Information about the contest:
For this contest, NDR seeks manuscripts of 20-40 pages. We welcome submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, in addition to cross- and a-genre work. We’re particularly interested in works that push against traditional understandings of literature and art, of their capacities. Our Ninth Annual Chapbook Competition is judged by National Poetry Series winner, National Book Award long-listed finalist, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Jos Charles.
Judge: Jos Charles
Prize: $250, publication, and 25 author copies
Deadline: February 3, 2020
Entry Fee: $17 ($8 from January 27-February 3)
Submit here!
Additional Submission Guidelines
- All entries must be previously unpublished and original work of the entrant.
- All submissions require a $17 ($8 from January 27-February 3) entry fee and must be entered through Submittable.
- Manuscripts should be 20-40 pages in length and should include a title page with contact information.
- Multiple submissions require separate entry fees.
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome on the condition that you notify us of an acceptance as soon as possible.
- Submissions will first be reviewed by our staff before finalists are passed on to our judge.
- Family, friends, and previous students of the judge are ineligible for participation in the contest. Current students and faculty of LSU are ineligible.
About this year’s judge:
Jos Charles is author of feeld, a National Book Award long-listed finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions) and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press). Charles has poetry published with POETRY, Poem-a-Day, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Charles’ writing has been featured on BitchMedia, Entropy, GLAAD, LAMBDA Literary, and elsewhere. In 2016 she received the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. In 2015 she received the Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. Jos Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. From 2013-2018 she served as the founding-editor for THEM lit, a trans literary journal. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, CA.
About last year’s winning chapbook and author:
Ayokunle Falomo is a Nigerian, American, a TEDx speaker, and the author of African, American (New Delta Review, 2019) and two self-published collections: KIN.DREAD (2017) and thread, this wordweaver must! (2014). His work has been featured in print and online numerous times, including in The New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, Write About Now, Glass Mountain, Berkeley Poetry Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, and The Texas Review. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony, and his poems have been selected as finalists or winners for Fourteen Hills Press’ Stacy Doris Memorial Award, Flypaper Magazine‘s Music Poetry Contest, The OffBeat‘s Poetry Contest, and Nimrod Journal‘s The Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from University of Houston, a Specialist in School Psychology degree from Sam Houston State University and is currently a Masters of Fine Arts (Poetry) student at University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
Of African, American, Selah Saterstrom writes:
“African, American acutely portraits the pain that a mouth re/members. I am blown away by the energy Ayokunle Falomo transmutes into the line: the way he rebloods the meat of the breath-wrapped and delivered word. Falomo reminds us that the body is always a revelatory body: a place of reading. A place where shatter-conjunctions acquire legibility; where documents and certificates seam-up with lamentation-celebrations. I keep thinking of this work as a match that brings light and fire into this long, long night.”
See a list of our past winners and judges here.