Critically-acclaimed and best-selling essayist and memoir writer Melissa Febos has chosen Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit as the winner of the 2021 Maine Chapbook Series. Jennifer Craig’s Breaking Our Hearts So Slowly was chosen as the runner up, and manuscripts by Amy Dempsey, Beatrix Gates, Georgie Hunt, Kala Ladenheim, Matthias Mann, Douglas Milliken, and Genanne Walsh were the finalists.

The MWPA sincerely thanks all of the writers who sent in their work. Submissions were read blindly, in a first round by two readers who are both nonfiction writers who have won Maine Literary Awards, and then in a smaller second round by Febos.

McCracken’s chapbook will be published in the early fall of 2022 with editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press. The MWPA will open a contest to select a cover image by a Maine artist for the chapbook in the coming weeks.

Born into a mixed-race family in Toronto, Coco McCracken (at right) has always been interested in writing about the intersectionality of place, race, and identity. With mystery shrouding her ancestry, her work is equal parts detective work and rhetorical relief, which comes from examining what it means to be a half-Asian, half-white woman, today. Now, raising a young daughter in Maine she embarks on her new immigrant identity as half-Canadian, half-American. Coco currently has a newsletter called Coco’s Echo, writes a monthly column for Amjambo Africa, and is working on her first memoir.

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a Best Book of 2017. Her second essay collection, Girlhood, a National Bestseller, was published by Bloomsbury on March 30. A craft book, Body Work, will be published by Catapult in March 2022. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

The Maine Chapbook Series began in 1983 as an initiative of the Maine Arts Commission. Then-assistant director and former Maine State Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum led the project, and it became a collaboration between MAC and MWPA that ran for over a decade, publishing one chapbook each year by an emerging poet or writer. Past judges included Philip Booth, Amy Clampitt, Donald Hall, David Huddle, Mary Oliver, and Charles Simic. For an example of the series’ impact, one need look no further than the 1991 competition: that year, poet Betsy Sholl won with her collection Pick a Card and the late poet Donald Hall served as the judge. Sholl went on to serve as Maine State Poet Laureate, and Hall served as the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006.

The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance brought back the Maine Chapbook Series in 2019, and poet Martha Collins chose Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone, which appeared in 2020. Fiction writer Sigrid Nunez then chose Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories, which appeared in 2021. Each three-year cycle, the contest will continue to rotate between poetry (2022), fiction (2023), and nonfiction (2024), and MWPA will publish and promote that year’s winning manuscript. Each year, MWPA involves a distinguished author from outside Maine who selects the winning manuscript and writes a brief introduction. Each year, the emerging writer selected to have their chapbook published receives a $500 prize and 25 copies of the book. An image by a Maine artist is selected for the cover, and the artist also receives a $500 prize. The Maine Chapbook Series has been made possible by the Maine Arts Commission, the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust, and the Nichols Fund. For more information about these chapbooks, click here.

2021 Maine Chapbook Series Winner