The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
After reading through hundreds of wonderful chapbooks, Map Literary is thrilled to announce the winner the 2023 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. Named after our late colleague, this biennial award honors beautiful, original writing through publication as a high-quality chapbook. This year's award focused on poetry and was judged by the first winner of the award, Dennis Hinrichsen.
We are extremely pleased to announce HOW TO BECOME THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS by FIONA LU as the winning manuscript!
Fiona Lu is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is author of the chapbook, How to Become the God of Small Things, which won the 2023 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Princeton University, and Ringling College, and has appeared in Kissing Dynamite and Sine Theta, and elsewhere. She is an alumni of the California State Summer School for the Arts, an editor for Polyphony Lit, one of the founding editors of the Renaissance Review and a prose editor for The Lumiere Review. She currently attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lu will receive 25 free copies of her chapbook, which will be published and sold on Amazon.com, and an honorarium of $1010.10.
The following entries have been selected as Finalists. Congratulations to these authors for standing out among a tough field of submissions!
Short-List:
Someday, Bullets Will Stop Trailing My Skin by Saheed Sunday
paper ghosts by Harley Chapman
sampaguita as alien species by Yvanna Vien Tica
Long-List:
a poem is a house by Linda Ravenswood
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING |ɡo͝od|ˈhousˌkēpiNG| by Katherine Gaffney
Tongues of Men and Angels by Janice Northerns
Asian Americana Study Hall by Maria Picone
Diez Espadas by Isa Guzman
Self-Portrait with Cicadasong by Despy Boutris
Prelude to Keening by V.C. McCabe
Vanishing Below the Waist by Ellie White
the third country by Votey Cheav
a woman made entirely of air by Romana Iorga
Thank you to all the authors who submitted their manuscripts, and thank you to Dennis Hinrichsen and the editorial team at Map Literary for judging this year's award!
2020 Winner: Pete Stevens, Tomorrow Music
Map Literary is so very pleased to present this year's Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award to a truly exceptional collection of short fictions. Of Stevens' manuscript TOMORROW MUSIC, judge Wendy Oleson writes: "I'm taken by the musicality of the language, the yearning of the characters for something flashier, more interesting than their sensible, comfortable lives.... Cultural appropriation bites back, though the power dynamic never wholly shifts. These pieces have spark."
Tomorrow Music is now available as a paperback--simply click here!
Pete Stevens is the fiction editor at Squalorly. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming at AGNI, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Copper Nickel, among others. Currently, he is writing and teaching in Minnesota. He can be found online at petestevensfiction.com.
The following superb entries have been selected as Finalists & Honorable Mentions. We heartily congratulate these authors for standing out among a tough field of submissions.
Finalists
"Your Seaside Town," by Anne Sanow
"Other People's Houses," by Kyle Mellen
Honorable Mentions
"The Doll House I Almost Believed," by Nathan Long
"When You Take These Bodies," by Joe Baumann
Map Literary is so very pleased to present this year's Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award to a truly exceptional collection of short fictions. Of Stevens' manuscript TOMORROW MUSIC, judge Wendy Oleson writes: "I'm taken by the musicality of the language, the yearning of the characters for something flashier, more interesting than their sensible, comfortable lives.... Cultural appropriation bites back, though the power dynamic never wholly shifts. These pieces have spark."
Tomorrow Music is now available as a paperback--simply click here!
Pete Stevens is the fiction editor at Squalorly. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming at AGNI, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Copper Nickel, among others. Currently, he is writing and teaching in Minnesota. He can be found online at petestevensfiction.com.
The following superb entries have been selected as Finalists & Honorable Mentions. We heartily congratulate these authors for standing out among a tough field of submissions.
Finalists
"Your Seaside Town," by Anne Sanow
"Other People's Houses," by Kyle Mellen
Honorable Mentions
"The Doll House I Almost Believed," by Nathan Long
"When You Take These Bodies," by Joe Baumann
2018 Winner: Greg Glazner, Cellar Testament
Greg Glazner's previous books of poetry are From the Iron Chair and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. A teacher at UC Davis, his awards include The Walt Whitman Award, The Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, and an NEA Fellowship. Recent poetry has appeared in Zone 3, Blackbird, and Poetry.
Greg Glazner's previous books of poetry are From the Iron Chair and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. A teacher at UC Davis, his awards include The Walt Whitman Award, The Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, and an NEA Fellowship. Recent poetry has appeared in Zone 3, Blackbird, and Poetry.
2016 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.
2016 Runner-Up: Jennifer Martelli, "Phobiacompendia"
2016 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"
2016 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 first 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]
