The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
Map Literary is extremely pleased to announce the winner of the second Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, judged by West Moss, John Parras, and Martha Witt. Our editors would like to thank all the brave and talented writers who submitted and donated. Unlimited congratulations to all the finalists!
Winner: Wendy Oleson, Our Daughter and Other Stories
Wendy’s stories appear or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Carve, Cherry Tree, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. In 2015 she won the storySouth Million Writers Award and was a fiction fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Based in Pullman, WA, and Los Angeles, CA, she teaches for the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, provides creative and academic editorial services, and dabbles in true crime TV writing. She is, of course, working on a novel.
Runner-Up: Jennifer Martelli, "Phobiacompendia"
Finalists:
William Cordeiro, “Whispering Gallery”
John Francis Istel, “Ambulance of Love and Other Stories”
Greg Gerke, “Does Eric Rohmer Have the All of Me?”
Amy Monticello, “How to Euthanize a Horse: Essays”
Alexandra Renwick, “We Beautiful Terrible Beasts”
Lizzi Wolf, “Notes from a Good Little Sister"
Finalists:
William Cordeiro, “Whispering Gallery”
John Francis Istel, “Ambulance of Love and Other Stories”
Greg Gerke, “Does Eric Rohmer Have the All of Me?”
Amy Monticello, “How to Euthanize a Horse: Essays”
Alexandra Renwick, “We Beautiful Terrible Beasts”
Lizzi Wolf, “Notes from a Good Little Sister"
Our previous winner, in 2014, was Dennis Hinrichsen. Hinrichsen's chapbook, Electrocution, A Partial History, is available for purchase by clicking here.
Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967-2009
Born in Manhattan, poet and editor Rachel Wetzsteon received degrees from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University. She made her home in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which is the setting for many of her formally assured poems. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Soren Kierkegaard, and Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon infused her urban and emotional landscapes with a dry wit. As critic Adam Kirsch noted in his review of Sakura Park, “Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation.”
Wetzsteon published three collections of poetry: National Poetry Series winner The Other Stars (1994), Home and Away (1998), and Sakura Park (2006), as well as Influential Ghosts (2007), a critical study of poet W.H. Auden. Silver Roses, a posthumous collection of her poetry, was published in 2010.
Wetzsteon’s honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, as well as a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She taught at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York and William Paterson University in New Jersey, and at the time of her death had recently joined The New Republic as their poetry editor.
[text and picture from the Poetry Foundation]
Wetzsteon published three collections of poetry: National Poetry Series winner The Other Stars (1994), Home and Away (1998), and Sakura Park (2006), as well as Influential Ghosts (2007), a critical study of poet W.H. Auden. Silver Roses, a posthumous collection of her poetry, was published in 2010.
Wetzsteon’s honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, as well as a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She taught at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York and William Paterson University in New Jersey, and at the time of her death had recently joined The New Republic as their poetry editor.
[text and picture from the Poetry Foundation]
