Chapbook Contest
Each spring, Quarterly West runs an open-genre chapbook contest. The winning writer receives $1000, publication, and 25 copies. Quarterly West will also publish a runner-up. All published authors will receive 25 author copies of their chapbook.
Send us poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, or any combination or hybridization therein. Please keep your submission to 18-40 pages. As judging is anonymous, any manuscripts with identifying marks (including an acknowledgments section) will be discarded.
The 2026 Chapbook Contest will be open for submissions from March 15 to April 15. We look forward to reading your manuscripts!
2025 Chapbook Judge
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.
2025 Chapbook Winners, Finalists, & Honorable Mentions
Quarterly West is delighted to announce the winners and finalists of our 2025 chapbook contest. Maggie Millner has selected Michael Pontacoloni’s collection Anadromous Fish of the Farmington River as winner and Sharon Du’s Emergency Exit as runner-up. The editors have selected David Ehmcke’s Broken Lyre as the editor’s choice.
Praise for Anadromous Fish of the Farmington River:
“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 & author of Couplets
Praise for Emergency Exit:
“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 & author of Couplets
We look forward to publishing these exemplary manuscripts in Spring 2026!
Finalists:
Tyler Dunston — Found Art
Mason Young — We Knelt Like We Were God
Nica Giromini — Dry Earths
Ben Porter — Houses No One Will Live In
Susan Prevost — There, Then Flying
Emily Barton Altman — The Water
Morgan Eklund — Kentucky Daughter Elegy
Congratulations to our winners, finalists, and honorable mentions, and sincere thanks to all who gave us the honor of reading their work.
The Quarterly West Chapbook Series
2023: Carolyn Guinzio’s collection Meanwhile in Arkansas (purchase) has won the 2023 chapbook contest judged by Jess Arndt. Rachele Salvini’s Oklahoma Bestiary (purchase) has been selected as runner-up. Ann Pedone’s Hotel Sappho was selected as an honorable mention. Both Carolyn Guinzio and Rachele Salvini have received offers of publication.
2022: Kieron Walquist’s Love Locks (purchase) has won the 2022 chapbook contest judged by Luther Hughes. Jeddie Sophronius’s Blood • Letting (purchase) has been selected as runner-up. Mylo Lam’s AND NOT / AND YET (purchase) has been selected as editors’ choice.
2021: Mukethe Kawinzi’s saanens, nubians, one lamancha (purchase), winner of the 2021 chapbook contest judged by TC Tolbert. Alyssandra Tobin’s Put Eyes on Me Not Like a Curse (purchase) selected as editors’ choice.
2020: 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.
2019: 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.
2018: Carlos Price-Sanchez’s Paper Waters, judged by Kaveh Akbar (purchase here). Brooke Larsen’s Origami Drama was selected as runner-up (purchase here). Anne Champion’s She Saints & Holy Profanities (here) and Mel Bosworth & Ryan Ridge’s A Month of Sundays (here) were selected as editors’ choices.
2017: John Jodzio’s This is All the Orientation You’re Gonna Get, judged by Garrard Conley (purchase here). Brandon Thurman’s Strange Flesh was selected as runner-up (purchase here).
2016: Juan Carlos Reyes’s A Summer’s Lynching: A Novella in Thirteen Loops, judged by Kate Bernheimer (purchase here).
2015: Mark Baumer’s Holiday Meat, judged by Lily Hoang.
2014: Nathan Poole’s Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, judged by Ben Percy (purchase here).
2013: Tim Wirkus’s Sandy Downs, judged by Michael Martone (purchase here).