Diana Khoi Nguyen has selected Julia Wohlstetter’s Cannot Sonnet as the winner of the 2024 Oversound Chapbook Prize. Congratulations to Julia and thanks so much to everyone who entered!
Julia Wohlstetter is the author of the chapbooks Please & Please and Forever Machine (IPRC, 2017). She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Truman Capote Fellow, a MacIntyre Fellow, and a Stanley Fellow for International Research. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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2024 Oversound Chapbook Prize
Judge: Diana Khoi Nguyen
$1000 and 50 copies to winner.
$18 to enter. (or $21 to enter and receive a back issue or previously published chapbook)
March 1-May 8, 2024
Manuscript length: 15-30 pages. For a manuscript outside this range, please contact us prior to sending.
Judge’s Bio:
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Guidelines:
Please do not include any identifying information on your manuscript.
No acknowledgments.
Manuscripts must be previously unpublished. (Individual poems may have been published.)
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable.
Multiple submissions to this contest are acceptable, but each submission requires an entry fee.
Past or present close friends or students of the judge or the editors are not eligible to enter.
Please do not submit revisions to your manuscript once it has been entered in the contest. Revisions are acceptable prior to publication.
No citizenship requirements or limitations.
Translations are not eligible.
Electronic submissions only. Make sure to choose Chapbook Contest under Genre in the submission manager. Payment for your submission should be made via PayPal after you submit the manuscript. The submission manager will send you to a page that contains the PayPal link, but if you run into trouble contact us at oversoundpoetry (AT) gmail (DOT) com. (If you choose to pay $21, we’ll be in touch to confirm which chapbook or back issue you’d like at the end of the contest submission period.)
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2023 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Alexis Almeida
Andrew Zawacki has selected Alexis Almeida’s Things I Have Made a Fiction as winner of the 2023 Oversound Chapbook Prize.
Author bio:
Alexis Almeida is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and most recently the translator of Dalia Rosetti’s Dreams and Nightmares (Les Figues, 2019) and co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Her translation of Fernanda Laguna’s Pañuelo de mocos is forthcoming with Dolce Stil Criollo. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in FENCE, the Poetry Project Newsletter, mercury firs, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and Columbia’s School of Narrative Medicine, and edits 18 Owls Press. More info at https://alexisfalmeida.com/
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2022 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Iva Moore
Sawako Nakayasu has chosen Iva Moore’s Women Collapse Into / Better, Brighter Artists as winner of the 2022 Oversound Chapbook Prize.
Iva Moore is a poet from Waverly, Kentucky. Her writing has been featured in Juked, Hobart, The Quarterless Review, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where she edits poetry for Columbia Journal. She runs Junk Drawer Poetics, a virtual seminar on objects in poems.
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2021 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Ethel Barja Cuyutupa
Timothy Donnelly has chosen Ethel Barja Cuyutupa’s Hope is tanning on a nudist beach as winner of the 2021 Oversound Chapbook Prize.
Ethel Barja Cuyutupa (Huanchar, Perú, 1988) Ph. D. Brown University 2021. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University and the author of the poetry collections Trofeo imaginado entre dientes (Lima, 2011), Insomnio vocal (Lima, 2016), Gravitaciones / Gravitations (Lima, 2017), and Travesía invertebrada seguida de Wandeo / Rambling Journey followed by Wandeo (Lima, 2019), which was awarded Cartografía Poética Prize (Peru). She holds an M.A. in Hispanic literary and Cultural Studies from University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.A. in Literature from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her literary work can be found in Voces al norte de la cordillera: Antología de voces andinas en los Estados Unidos (2016), Hostos Review, Los Bárbaros (EE.UU.), Stadtsprachen Magazin, alba.lateinamerika lesen, Lateinamerika Nachrichten (Germany), and Revista Lucerna (Peru). She was a guest at the XXV Encuentro Internacional de Escritores (Mexico, 2020), Latinale Poetry Festival (Germany, 2018), and the Hispanic / Latina Book Fair in New York (2017, 2020).
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2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Louise Akers
Brandon Shimoda has chosen Louise Akers’s Alien year as the winner of the 2020 competition.
Louise Akers is a poet living in Queens, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and received the Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Louise’s work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, MIDTERM, Confrontation Magazine, Bat City Review, Fugue Journal, bæst journal, and elsewhere.
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2019 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Silvina López Medin
Mary Jo Bang has chosen Silvina López Medin’s Excursion as the winner of the 2019 competition.
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and currently lives in New York. She is the author of three books of poetry: La noche de los bueyes (Madrid, 1999), which won the International Young Poetry Prize by the Loewe Foundation, Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar (Buenos Aires, 2014), and 62 brazadas (Buenos Aires, 2015). Her play, Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo, 2008) was granted the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (2015) and Home Movies (2016), a selection of poems by Robert Hass, into Spanish. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.
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2018 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Kanika Agrawal.
Solmaz Sharif has chosen Kanika Agrawal’s Okazaki Fragments as the winner of the 2018 competition.
Kanika Agrawal is a hybrid specimen raised in six countries on four continents. She studied biology at MIT, where she came to love restriction enzymes and fluorescent labeling. She received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, SAND, and various SF&F publications.