The Quarterly West Chapbook Contest
The 2026 Quarterly West chapbook contest is now closed. We will open for chapbook submissions for the 2027 contest in February.
The winning manuscript receives $1000, publication, and 25 copies. Quarterly West may also offer publication to a runner-up manuscript. Send us poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, or any combination or hybridization therein. Please keep your submission to 26 - 40 pages. As judging is anonymous, any manuscripts with identifying marks (including an acknowledgments section) will be discarded.
The Quarterly West Chapbook Series
2025 Winner: Anadromous Fish of the Farmington River by Michael Pontacoloni
"It's a far-fetched and ambitious project to braid the story of a WWI-era serial killer with that of a restless poet navigating heartbreak in the twenty-first century, digressing regularly into the migratory patterns of Connecticut fish all the while. Yet this collection pulls it off with grace and style, in language as fresh and clarion as the river it exalts. These poems face both outward and inward with rare lucidity and genuine curiosity; they animate the textures of contemporary displacement even as they situate their readers rigorously in the place of their making." — Maggie Millner, contest judge
2025 Runner-Up: Emergency Exit by Sharon Du
“This quicksilver collection consistently surprised me with its uncanny imagery, tonal leaps, and epigrammatic wisdom. The poems in "Emergency Exit" confront loss, migration, and the strangeness of the present—with its internet-speak, creeping globalization, and apocalyptic doom—with uncommon poise and Dickinsonian understatement. It is a thrill to watch them twist and turn, confess and demur, assert and grieve and play.” — Maggie Millner, contest judge
2025 Editor’s Choice: History of Lyric by David Ehmcke
"I do not believe in the beauty of brokenness," writes David Ehmcke. In these elegant poems, heartache-another word for grief-is nonlinear, radiant. Evocative refusals complicate the yearning, lush details leap off the page, the past is ever-present. Ehmcke reminds us (and himself that heartache is a matrix, where beauty and brokenness coexist, overlap. Ehmcke's deft control of language allows us to feel the emotional reckonings, the intellectual swerves. These poems are clear-eyed, indelible.” — Eduardo C. Corral
2024 Winner: Meanwhile in Arkansas by Carolyn Guinzio
“I love this more ardently with every reading. Both a long poem and a series of
semitransparent links or deft bends, “we bite sometimes not/ knowing what we
bite” marks the feeling and flavor of Meanwhile in Arkansas–everywhere
showing its sly, earned wise-ness (minus any of wisdom’s hubris) in these courageously outlier poems. Here place or locality (spring-fed, greasy) is entirely something else. Instead, via the gift of the poems’ repeating titular pulse, an undercurrent, an eddy, a passing suggestion or shadow might snag us into back into our vital and fugitive subselves, the relief of our overlooked regions.” — Jess Arndt, contest judge
2024 Runner-Up: Oklahoma Bestiary by Rachele Salvini
“In these five crackling stories, bodies—both real and grief-imagined—come worst, architects of their own destruction, Oklahoma Bestiary’s inner panes feel lit with sensitivity, opening towards material feelings that are both tenderizing and tender. A roadrunner, despite its apparent stamina, can only run for so long. Says the story’s weary troubadour: “I often think about myself at the end of high school, about that roadrunner, a second before exploding, his head low, no direction, just a bunch of young, strong muscles that made him keep going… .” Part of the power in Rachele Salvini’s rendering is how mutually she treats the bodies on her pages. Cockroaches, opossums, a chimerical and
ill-fated gator, flies—all feel distinctly alive, as in: failing, wounded, and ultimately desirous of something as yet ungraspable, but more, like us.” — Jess Arndt, contest judge
2022 Winner: Love Locks by Kieron Walquist (Sold Out!)
“We move through Love Locks the way one might encounter a town over time—slowly at first, noticing random objects by the side of the road or the kids throwing rocks at each other, laughing innocently. And then out of nowhere, the town becomes yours; the town becomes part of you. This is the beauty of Love Locks!” —Luther Hughes, contest judge
2022 Runner-Up: Blood/Letting by Jeddie Sophronius
“Do not say something happened; do not say nothing / happened,” starts a poem in Blood·Letting, a collection of poems responding to widespread acts of violence against Indonesia over decades. The writer of these poems is relentless in the best possible way, never letting us take a moment of breath as acts are recalled again and again—and why would we want to? From poem to poem, death unravels in ways that chill the body motionless, reminding us of the horrors Indonesia has faced. But, as positively loud these poems are, what creeps under is pain. We’re being asked to reckon with harm. We’re being asked to stick with it. We’re being told, “Look at how my people have suffered.” Yes, it is suffering that bears its teeth in this collection. And anger. And fright. And the desire to see loved ones live. — Luther Hughes, contest judge
2022 Editor’s Choice: And Not/And Yet by Mylo Lam
“From the very beginning, AND NOT/ AND YET stood out from the creativity of its forms and the emotional scope of the project, as well as its fascinating exploration of relationships between individual and collective, living and dead, contemporary and historical/ancestral. The narratives in these poems are rendered with such tenderness and care, and the multiplicity of voices and the shapes they take on the page build a world that feels larger than the number of pages presented here.” —Audrey Bauman, Senior Chapbooks Editor
2021 Winner: Saanens, Nubians, One Lamancha by Mukuthe Kawinzi (Sold Out!)
“Every time I re-read saanens, nubians, one lamancha, I find another way to be in wonder, to be stilled by the scorch of song, and to delight in formal dexterity. Centering the experiences of a black poet farmer in rural Florida, this collection is a corrective to a white supremacist eco-poetics canon. And it is nature poetry at its most sublime – brilliant and brimming with tender and incisive lyrical range.” — TC Tolbert, contest judge
2021 Editor’s Choice: Put Eyes on Me Not Like a Curse by Alyssandra Tobin
“Eyes maintains a delicious velocity as it knits high and low, contemporary and historic, lyric and narrative — the immediacy and tender menace of these poems stood out from the very first round of readings.” – Corley Miller, Senior Chapbooks Editor
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Benjamin Gucciardi’s Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (purchase), winner of the 2020 chapbook contest judged by Elena Passarello. Katherine MacCue’s Cassandra, Cassandra (purchase), contest runner-up. Penelope Pelizzon’s Of Vinegar Of Pearl (purchase) and Alice Hall’s Universal Casket (purchase) selected as editors’ choices.
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Jadyn Dewald’s A Love Supreme: Fragments and Ephemera has taken the first place in the 2019 chapbook contest. Lauren Fath’s A Landlocked State and Andrea Spofford & Stephanie Bryant Anderson’s Phrasebook for the Common Era were selected as editors’ choices. Purchase any of our chapbooks here.
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Juan Carlos Reyes’s A Summer’s Lynching: A Novella in Thirteen Loops, judged by Kate Bernheimer (purchase here).
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Mark Baumer’s Holiday Meat, judged by Lily Hoang.
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Nathan Poole’s Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, judged by Ben Percy (purchase here).
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Tim Wirkus’s Sandy Downs, judged by Michael Martone (purchase here).