This poetry reading and publications launch celebrating our 2023 Chapbook Competition winner, Bhion Achimba, and runners-up, sadé powell and Suji k. Kim, will be hosted by the competition’s 2023 Guest Judge, Aracelis Girmay. We will also hear from the artists who designed, printed, and assembled this year’s publications: Amber Braverman, Valentina Améstica, Kyung Eun You and Kristen Mueller.
Of Achimba’s winning manuscript Girmay said, “These works carry such urgencies, and yet the poems move along unhurried, at times meditative, in page after page of this exquisitely crafted work. The poems carry such beauty into the frame — a poet’s mind awake to the blessing of the ants (the ant-eating through the written law!! I am astounded, YES) in what feels like a ceremony of lovers — and in this way insist that beauty exists always, even as the speaker survives a spectrum of hate crimes and violences. I am moved by the wide arms of the works, the absurdity of the lists of late-capitalism where the speaker’s deportee letter was delivered by a woman with “bangs and converse shoes / laid down beside a shipment of / amazon packages” and later the handwarmers and chapsticks. Formally, the poems seem like they simultaneously undo and remake place through language. Or language through the place of the poem. ”
Broadsides and chapbooks are available at a special price for event attendees (broadsides are normally $20 each and chapbooks are $50).
RSVP today!
Annual Chapbook Competition
Submit your manuscript for the 2024 Chapbook Competition now–>
