Results
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We are excited to announce that Winshen Liu's Paper Money has been chosen by Diane Seuss as this year's winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest! Here is a wonderful blurb from Diane about the collection:
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Winshen Liu's Paper Money begins with “Conjugation,” a poem that inventively enacts the slipperiness of language, especially for those immigrants who must negotiate a relationship with a new tongue, and therefore a new system of meaning. “Catch // the rise before it falls to rose, lilac / to lily, orchid to orchard. Tell me / where we missed: strike // one, strike two, the clock strikes / twelve, the mouse runs down, and you’re out / now sick, stricken, stroke.” It is a destabilizing and exhilarating ride. Other poems echo a legacy of poverty and ingenuity, in equal measure. It is food that provides the fundamental bond to family and cultural memory, in which Taiwan arrives in the steam of jasmine rice, a fig in the “fancy food store” gives birth to yearning and to rhyme, and the “nectared geyser” of white peaches becomes the nexus of elegiac pleasure. These poems awaken our own yearning for the universe of the senses that Liu renders with an exquisitely refined depth of observation. Tadpoles in a stream are “jellied rain.” The throats of frogs are “engorged / with the unsaid.” As the sensuous present tense meets up with the eternity of the dead, the ashes of the body become “front teeth and fresh / paint, magician’s wave and cuff links.” The impact of the whole is one in which the elegance of craft provides compressed containers for histories and feelings that would otherwise be unmanageable in their immensity, a treasure in paper money always on the verge of going up in smoke.
— Diane Seuss
author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
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We also want to give a huge thank you to our finalists. Their work wowed us, and it was an honor to read their poems.
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Michael Prior's Delta
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William Stobb's The Agonies
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Karla Khine's Quasi-Metalloid
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Leticia Priebe Rocha's CAUTION: Contains SHARP OBJECTS
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Melissa Dias' Mandoly's Fuse
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Mary Ardery's When I Bring You Home
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Joshua Garcia's Nudes: 21 Poems after Philip Pearlstein
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Abbigail Baldys' Some Experiments Stretching Out the Song
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Emily Stokes' Joystorm
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Finally, we thank everyone who submitted to this contest. We love being able to share chapbooks with our readers, and it is an honor to receive so much amazing work.
The 2024 Adrift Chapbook Contest
Timeline
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Submissions are open from March 1st 2024 until July 31st 2024.
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Finalists and winner will be announced by Driftwood editors in November 2024.
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The winning chapbook(s) will be published in 2025.
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Guidelines
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Poetry only. Prose poetry, experimental poetry, and poetry with a visual component (color images accepted) are all welcome.
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15-40 pages of poetry (this does not include title, section break, or acknowledgement pages). We won't turn you away if you are a few pages over or under, but please stay close to that limit.
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A standard, 12-point font is preferred.
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Poems may have been published individually, but not as a collection.
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Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please let us know immediately if the collection has been accepted elsewhere.
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Submit works written in English only, no translations.
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Please submit your manuscript in a .doc, .docx, or PDF format.
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We read submissions blind, so please do not include your name, email, or any identifying characteristics on the manuscript itself.
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Submission fee is $25.00 USD. Each submitter will receive a free copy of a Driftwood Press poetry chapbook of their choosing in the mail.
Awards
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The winner will receive $750 dollars and 20 copies of their chapbook.
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A print run of the winning chapbook will be sold on our website, through affiliate bookstores, and will be nationally and internationally distributed by Ingram.
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The winner will also have the opportunity to be interviewed about their work; the interview will be published in the chapbook following the poems.
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The managing poetry editor may offer a runner-up full publication. If a runner-up is chosen, they will be awarded $350, 20 contributor copies, and the same level of marketing and distribution.
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Past Contest Winners
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​Guest Judge
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Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998). Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Seuss earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University.