Poetry Chapbook Competition: Wells College Press

Wells College Press invites submissions to its annual Poetry Chapbook Contest. The deadline for the 2016 competition is November 30, 2015. The winner will be announced in January 2016.

 

The author of the chosen manuscript will receive 20 copies of the letterpress printed, hand-sewn chapbook. The author will also be invited to read from her or his new chapbook at Wells College in the fall of 2016. The poet will receive a $500 honorarium + room and board for the reading.

 

We print editions of 100 signed and numbered copies. We craft every aspect of our chapbooks individually and obsessively: Prior chapbooks have included all type and ornament cast in metal at the Bixler Letterfoundry in Skaneatles specifically for those projects. Our books also feature hand-set title pages and hand-sewn bindings. The winning chapbook will continue this tradition of craftsmanship.

 

In honor of the gorgeous location of the Wells College Press, right on the shore of Cayuga Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region, the chapbook series focuses on poems with a strong sense of place. We understand place to be geographical, social, political, spiritual, etc.

 

Submission Guidelines:

 

--18-30 manuscript pages (with no more than one poem per page)
--Individual poems may have been published in periodicals, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished. An acknowledgments page is optional (though it will be included in the final chapbook).
--Co-authored manuscripts and translated manuscripts are welcome.
--Close personal friends of the judges, as well as current or former students of the judges, are ineligible.
--Multiple submissions are welcome, but each submission must be accompanied by a separate entry fee.
--Please limit your identifying information to your cover letter; the manuscript itself must be anonymous, as the judging will be blind.

 

How to submit:

 

Online via Submittable.
Or mail hard copies to:

 

Chapbook Contest
Wells Book Arts Center
Wells College
170 Main Street
Aurora, New York 13026.

 

Make checks for $20 payable to Wells College, with “WCPress entry fee” on the memo line.
Include an SASE for notification of the results.
Optional: Include a self-addressed, stamped postcard for acknowledgment of receipt.

 

The final judges of the 2016 WCP Poetry Chapbook Contest are Bruce Bennett and Dan Rosenberg.

 

Bruce Bennett is the author of nine volumes of poetry and more than twenty-five poetry chapbooks. His New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances (Orchises Press), was chosen by Booklist as “One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999.” He co-founded and served as an editor of Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics and Ploughshares, and was the Poetry Editor for Stone Canoe Issue #9. In 2012 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize. In 2014 he retired from Wells College, where he taught literature and creative writing and directed the Visiting Writers Series. He is now Emeritus Professor of English.

 

Dan Rosenberg is the author of The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015). He has also written two chapbooks, A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press, 2010) and Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn, forthcoming 2015), and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome (Zephyr Press, forthcoming 2015). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Rosenberg earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from The University of Georgia. He teaches literature and creative writing at Wells College and co-edits Transom.

 

E-mail with questions: 

 

bookartscenterATwellsDOTedu (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

 

More details here.