Join us for an evening of celebrating the work of the Chapbook Contest participants with the reveal of this year’s chapbooks and broadsides.
The Chapbook Contest is an annual program that awards the author of the winning manuscript with the publication of a limited edition chapbook, designed, printed, and bound by artists at Center for Book Arts. This year’s contest winner is Miriam Bird Greenberg, who was selected by Guest Judge Edwin Torres.
This evening will feature poetry readings by Edwin Torres, Miriam Bird Greenberg, and Trinity Tibe.
Guest Judge
Edwin Torres is the author of 9 books including, Xoeteox: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), and In The Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat). He is editor of the inter-disciplinary collection, The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). Fellowships include; New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, The DIA Arts Foundation, and an Artist’s Choice Residence at The Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond Va. He’s taught his sensory-based workshop, “Brainlingo: Writing The Voice Of The Body,” across the country and has been commissioned by Letras Latinas to create work based on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s art installation Pulse, which uses interactive technology to explore humanity’s connection to the heartbeat. His work is widely anthologized, including: American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement, Post-American Poetry Vol. 2, and Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing.
Winner
The Sixth Extinction (The Other World) by Miriam Bird Greenberg
With this work, the writer brings to our world a brilliantly cohesive other world, running parallel to a current existence, a present other. A cataclysmic landscape, which calls to question a continuous fluidity through our daily extinction—a quietly honed freefall that allows poetry and its underlying tendrils to reach beyond the same body as the new story. Presented as equal parts journal and world-making, this book tosses convention through the gyre of sentence, rhythm, line break, and a deft ear for re-idiomatic’ing poetic construct—to redefine a sort of experiential rebirth in book form. Gorgeous, smart, loose and tight…all at once.
Runners up
African, American by Ayokunle Falomo
The imagination and cross-fusion of two subject matters to cover an iconic genre, is inspired and powerful. I love the unexpected openings in the details and how the physicality of the text and page is utilized in the formatting of data. Plus, the reach beyond historical data to investigate how poetry can emerge underneath difficult terrain, is a testament to perseverance and the human condition. Inside the shifted perspective is where clarity begins to emerge as a new viewpoint for understanding, for possible change.
My Blood Must Have Something To Do With Me by Trinity Tibe
The missing parental figure taps into a universal search for connection — a search to define absence, which connects to the creative regeneration of search as a narrative. These focused, emotionally concise pieces give the reader open space to feel the heat and heart of the writer, and to then land as an outsider — to family/to country/to language. How the artistic relocates the authentic, and where origin looks for definition.
