Congratulations to the winner of this year’s Chapbook Contest — Dana Diehl, whose TV Girls is forthcoming from NDR!
Photo by Melissa Goodrich
On TV Girls, our judge, Chen Chen, writes:
“‘The TV girls tell us they’re ready to rappel down skyscrapers for love.’ Dana Diehl’s collection of very short and very media-obsessed stories is witty, oddball, frequently hilarious, and always memorable. The title story alone made this fiction writer turned poet want to return to his first love. Story after story, Diehl discovers fraught vulnerabilities and startling truths in the lives of girls and women confronting the expectations of TV, lovers, family, and one another. ‘You decide you will buy a house for all of the worst case scenarios,’ Diehl writes, then shows us how impossible it is to find that house, how strange it is to long for both the sanctuary and the danger.”
Dana Diehl earned her MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University and her BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. She is the author of Our Dreams Might Align (Jellyfish Highway Press, 2016). The collection is scheduled for republication from Splice UK in April 2018. Dana has taught Composition, Creative Writing, and Humanities at Arizona State University, Florence Prison, the National University of Singapore, and BASIS Tucson Primary. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in North American Review, Passages North, Booth, The Offing, and elsewhere. She lives in Tucson.
Also, congratulations to Ploy Pirapokin, whose How to Be Extraordinary in America was selected as the runner-up!
Additional congratulations and thanks to our amazing finalists:
Make it Till Morning — E. Kristin Anderson
What I Know of the Mountains — Hajjar Baban
Sex Without Touching — Mikko Harvey & Ashley Yang-Thompson
Rot Contracts — Jessica Lawson
Smoke Girl — Simone Person
Suffer, Fools — Rhoads Stevens
DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX — Candice Wuehle
And much love to our honorable mentions, whose works were stunning in their own right:
Feye — Rocket Caleshu
flood drip — Kirsten Ihns
Grace and Phineas, or Perennials — Philip Matthews
Conversing with the Dead — Clio Velentza
Finally, thank you so much to everyone who submitted. We received an unprecedented amount of submissions and were incredibly impressed by their breadth and quality. Be on the lookout for details about pre-ordering TV Girls!
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 Seventh Annual Chapbook Competition is judged by the amazingly talented Chen Chen, whose work is a testament to the radical “possibilities” of poetry.
Judge: Chen Chen
Prize: $250, publication, and 25 author copies
Deadline: January 10, 2018
Entry Fee: $17 ($8 from December 26-January 2)
Submit here!
Additional Submission Guidelines
- All entries must be previously unpublished and original work of the entrant.
- All submissions require a $17 ($8 from December 26-January 2) 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:
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry. Chen’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Saltonstall Foundation. Currently, he is the recipient of a J.T. and Margaret Talkington fellowship, pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. With Sam Herschel Wein, he edits the journal Underblong. For more, visit chenchenwrites.com.
(photo by Jess Chen)
About last year’s winning chapbook and author:
Dorothy Chan was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and 2017 finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Plume, The Journal, Spillway, Little Patuxent Review, and The McNeese Review. She is the Assistant Editor of The Southeast Review. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.
Douglas Kearney selected her chapbook, Chinatown Sonnets, as the winner of our Sixth Annual Chapbook Contest. Also, be on the lookout for her debut full-length collection, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, which will be published by Spork Press in March 2018.
Read an interview with Dorothy Chan and four poems from Chinatown Sonnets in our current issue. Also, check out these reviews from Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Asian Review of Books and The Common.
See a list of our past winners and judges here.