Chapbook Competitions
The Summer Tiny Chapbook Competition is now closed!
Closes September 1, 2023
Poetry International prides itself on featuring chapbooks (or “portfolios”) both in English and in translation. We have featured Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forché, Jacquelyn Pope, Christian Wiman, Amy Gerstler, Bob Hicok, and new translations of Anna Swir, Osip Mandelstam, Yannis Ritsos, Tomaz Salamun, and René Char. We would be delighted to have the opportunity to include your name in this list!
We are looking for chapbooks with consistently strong poems—poems that speak to one another lyrically and thematically. A review of the finalists and winners from recent competitions has revealed that the strongest chapbooks are typically the shortest; as a result, we have changed the page limit and invite you to send a gathering of your strongest work to be considered for Poetry International’s Tiny Chapbook Competition.
Winning chapbooks will be announced on our websites and on social media and published as portfolios. We look forward to reading your work.
The Prize: Publication in Poetry International and contributor copy.
Reading Periods: Winter January 1 to Feb 1 and Summer June 1 to Sept 1
Reading Fee: $20
See guidelines at bottom of page or go to Submittable.
Poetry International is proud to announce the winner of the Winter 2023 Chapbook Competition
David Moolten’s The Moirologist chosen by Blas Falconer, will be published in Poetry International‘s 30th issue.
Falconer observes,
“Dying is my mother’s last ruse,” David Molten writes in his chapbook, The Moirologist. Here, irony and prosody infuse the poems with an electric charge, intensifying the exploration of grief and loss to create a compelling and deeply moving collection.”
About David Moolten
After sampling various careers, including nursing home orderly, chemical plant security guard, package delivery driver and laboratory glassware washer, David Moolten settled on transfusion medicine. He is also the author of three books of poetry, most recently Primitive Mood (Truman State University, 2009) which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. His verse has appeared widely in journals such as Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He lives, writes, and practices in Philadelphia.
The Summer 2022 Chapbook Competition Winner
Armen Davoudian’s Berlin, translations of selected poems by Fatemeh Shams
Berlin will be published in issue 29 of Poetry International.
Armen Davoudian’s translations of Iranian poet Fatemeh Shams’s Berlin capture the haunting voice of one woman pulling a suitcase across the streets of the world–Sandra Alcosser, editor-in-chief.
About Armen Davoudian
Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the 2020 Frost Place Competition. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
About Fatemeh Shams
Fatemeh Shams is the author of When They Broke Down the Door (Mage), translated by Dick Davis, and of the critical monograph A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). Her poetry has been featured in Poetry magazine, PBS NewsHour, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Andrew Gebhardt’s In Light of My Tropic of Water, translations of selected poems by Lêdo Ivo
In Light of My Tropic of Water will be published in issue 29 of Poetry International.
Andrew Gebhardt’s translations of the brilliant Brazilian poet, Lêdo Ivo’s In Light of My Tropic of Water, set in Ivo’s home city of Maceió, are a gift to the world akin to Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude–Sandra Alcosser, editor-in-chief.
About Andrew Gebhardt
Andrew Gebhardt is a writer, teacher, and editor who has lived in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, and Cyprus. In addition to poems, translations, and essays, he has published a book of nonfiction, Holland Flowering, about the Dutch flower industry. He is currently working on translations of poems by Lêdo Ivo as well as the poet’s unique memoir, Confissoẽs de um poeta (Confessions of a Poet).
About Lêdo Ivo
Lêdo Ivo was born in Brazil’s northeast state of Alagoas in 1924, and wrote prolifically, producing poetry, essays, novels, short stories, children’s literature, literary criticism, and journalism. He also translated into Portuguese works by Jane Austen, Arthur Rimbaud, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Not much of his poetry has been translated into English; a novel, Snakes’ Nest, was published by New Directions in 1981. He wrote passionately of his beloved hometown, Maceió, but was equally a citizen of the world, at home writing from many places and perspectives. He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and received numerous national and international awards for his writing, including the Casa de las Américas Prize for Brazilian literature in 2009. He died in 2012.
The Winter 2022 Chapbook Competition Winner
Carmen Leigh Keates’ Feldspar
chosen by editor-in-chief Sandra Alcosser, will be published in Poetry International’s 29th issue in spring 2023.
Alcosser observes,
One feels blessed by the precision, depth and uncanniness of Carmen Keates’ imagination.. In Feldspar natural and simulated objects surrounding each of us—things like rhizomes and dreaming computers—began a conversation. This collection creates a glowing animation of the physical world.
About Carmen Leigh Keates
Carmen Leigh Keates is a poet from Brisbane, Australia. Her first collection, the cinema-themed Meteorites, was published by Whitmore Press, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards. Carmen has worked as a writing teacher and also as an academic learning advisor, and has a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Queensland. She is an editor of the poetry journal foam:e.
The Summer 2021 Chapbook Competition Winner
Vasiliki Albedo’s Arcadia,
Arcadia, chosen by editor-in-chief Sandra Alcosser, will be published in Poetry International’s 29th issue in spring 2023.
About Vasiliki Albedo
Vasiliki Albedo is a poet and energy strategist. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ambit, Magma, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Poetry Salzburg, The North and elsewhere. She was commended in the National Poetry Competition (UK) 2018 and was joint winner in the 2020 Live Canon pamphlet competition. She grew up in Greece and holds postgraduate degrees in Strategy and Management from the London School of Economics, and in Energy Trade and Finance from the Bayes Business School, specializing in renewable energy. She has worked for development agencies within the United Nations and for NGOs such as Greenpeace and SolarAid helping create strategies for a more sustainable and equitable future.
The Winter 2021 Chapbook Competition Winner
Don Bogen’s The Art of Shadows, translations of poems by Juan Lamillar
The Art of Shadows, chosen by editor-in-chief Sandra Alcosser, will be published in Poetry International’s 29th issue in spring 2023.
About Don Bogen
Don Bogen is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Immediate Song (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and the translator of Europa: Selected Poems of Julio Martínez Mesanza (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2016). Awards for his work include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Camargo Foundation and a Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute. He has held Fulbright positions at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, and the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo in Spain. Bogen’s translations of contemporary Spanish poetry have appeared in Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, Two Lines, Tupelo Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, The Arkansas International, and other journals. Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, he serves as editor-at-large for The Cincinnati Review. His website is www.donbogen.com.
About Juan Lamillar
Born in Seville in 1957, Juan Lamillar is among the most prominent of a generation of Spanish poets who came of age in the early 1980s. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including a volume of selected poems in 2015. Prizes for his work include the Premio Luis Cernuda for his third book Música oscura in 1989, the Premio Vicente Nuñez for his fifth book Los días más largos (1993), and the Premio Villa de Rota for La hora secreta in 2008. Along with his poetry, he has published several collections of essays and a biography of the Andalusian poet Joaquín Romero Murube in 2004. His work has not previously been translated into English.
Guidelines
- Work must be previously unpublished as a whole (individual poem publication is okay).
- Simultaneous submissions are okay as long as you inform us immediately if the chapbook has been accepted for publication elsewhere.
- All individual poems will be considered for publication.
- Manuscripts can be anywhere from 8-16 page pages in length.
- Collaborations and translations are welcome as long as the submitting author has the rights to the work. For translations, please send only the English version.
- Please include a cover letter with the following information: Your name, phone number, and email address.
- All chapbooks should have a separate title page.
- NOTE: Your submission title & the name of the document you attach should be your chapbook title.
We only accept submissions electronically through Submittable.
No current or former staff of Poetry International or recent graduates of San Diego State University are eligible to submit.
Poetry International reserves the right to re-print the work already published in PI in our future issues or anthologies.