Maine Chapbook Series

Chap-book \ˈchap-ˌbu̇k\ noun: A modern name applied by book-collectors and others to specimens of popular literature formerly circulated by itinerant dealers or “chapmen,” consisting chiefly of small pamphlets of popular tales, ballads, tracts, etc.

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:

1. Poet Martha Collins chose Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone, which appeared in 2020.

2. Fiction writer Sigrid Nunez then chose Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories, which appeared in 2021.

3. Memoir and nonfiction writer Melissa Febos chose Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit, which appeared in the fall of 2022.

4. Poet Joshua Bennett chose Sasha Goodwin’s Centipede, which appeared in the fall of 2023.

5. Most recently, fiction writer Manuel Gonzales chose Aliza Dube’s The Dependents, and we published it in the fall of 2024.

Each three-year cycle, the contest will continue to rotate between nonfiction (2024), poetry (2025), and fiction (2026) 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. For more information about recent judges, winners, and chapbooks, please see below.

Since 2019, each Maine Chapbook Series edition has been edited and designed in collaboration with Pink Eraser Press.

To order copies of the winners of the Maine Chapbook Series, please contact your local bookseller or head over to our page on Bookshop.org.

Chapbook Cover Contest

The MWPA has opened contest to select a cover image by a Maine artist for Mike Bendzela’s chapbook. Maine artists can read the guidelines and an excerpt and submit images on our Submittable page HERE. Cover contest submissions are open until April 15, 2025. There is no charge for entry, and the winning artist will receive $500 and 5 copies of the chapbook.

2024 Chapbook Contest Winner

Chloé Cooper Jones has selected Notes From Above Ground by Mike Bendzela as the winner of the 2024 Maine Chapbook Series. Manuscripts by Sondra Bogdonoff, Jennifer Braunfels, Mara Buck, Kate Horowitz, and Liz Iversen were the finalists, and manuscripts by Jennifer Craig and Andrea Vassallo received honorable mentions as finalists and runners up.

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 MWPA awards and fellowships, and then in a smaller second round by Cooper Jones.

Bendzela’s chapbook will be published in the early fall of 2025 with editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.

Mike Bendzela lives in Standish on the historic Dow Farm estate restored by his husband. He teaches writing at the University of Southern Maine and is also the superintendent of a local cemetery. During the summer, he grows heritage apples for markets around Portland. In the past, he has worked on his husband's restoration construction crew and as an EMT in his town. He is also an American old time musician, playing fiddle and banjo. He received a Pushcart Prize for short fiction in 1992. His book of evolutionary fables, a hybrid work of fiction/prose poetry, Metazoan Variations, was published in 2020 by UnCollected Press. He is a monthly columnist for the website 3 Quarks Daily, from which the essays in this collection are drawn.

2024 Chapbook Contest Nonfiction Judge

Chloé Cooper Jones judged the 2024 Maine Chapbook Series. O Magazine calls her book Easy Beauty “[An] exquisite memoir” and notes, “Here Pulitzer finalist Jones reflects on our standards of beauty from the perspective of a disabled woman whose rare congenital condition affects her stature and gait, and leaves her in constant pain. But it’s ultimately motherhood that liberates her, and prompts her to reexamine the limitations she has accepted as givens.”

Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time, and others. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and an Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. In 2020, Chloé was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing for “Fearing for His Life,” a profile of Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

• The Maine Chapbook Series is open to all current Maine residents (including part-time, seasonal residents who grew up in Maine and have a regular presence in the state and/or those who own a second home in the state).

• Only those who have not published a book in this year’s genre may enter.

• MWPA members may enter for $15 and nonmembers for $25 per submitted manuscript. More than one submission is allowed per person but each must include an entry fee.

• All entrants will receive a copy of the winning book.

• Nonfiction manuscripts should be 10,00-25,000 words in length (front matter not included). Manuscripts may consist of collected essays, memoir, or any form of creative nonfiction.

• Please note that MWPA asks for one-time rights to the work published in the winning chapbook, meaning the rights revert to the author and could be published in a later full-length publication.

Past Winners

2023 Chapbook Series Winner

Award-winning fiction writer Manuel Gonzales chose Aliza Dube’s The Dependents as the winner of the 2023 Maine Chapbook Series in fiction. Manuscripts by Kurtis Clements, Julie Delany, Rylan Hynes, Kristin Kearns, Laura Levenson, Debora Martin, and Cassandra Powers were the finalists, and manuscripts by Philip Shelley and Megan Turner received honorable mentions.

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 fiction writers who have won MWPA awards and fellowships, and then in a smaller second round by Gonzales.

Dube’s chapbook was published in the early fall of 2024 with editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.

Aliza Dube graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington with a degree in Creative Writing in 2018. After graduation, she married and became an Army wife in the Midwest. On post, she found herself in a world of fascinating characters and irreconcilable contradictions. The people she met and the places she visited would have a lasting impact on her work. She is currently a student in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing. She is the author of the memoir The Newly Tattooed’s Guide to Aftercare (2020). She strives to tell stories for people like her who grew up struggling to find characters like themselves in books.

Chapbook Cover Contest

We are happy to announce that Holly Willis is the winner of this year’s chapbook cover contest. An image of hers will appear on the cover of Aliza Dube’s The Dependents, which will be released this fall.

Holly Willis is a writer and artist working primarily in film, video, and still photography with a body of work that explores the materiality of images within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film and video. Deeply inspired by landscape, she lives parts of each year in Los Angeles, Joshua Tree, and Islesboro. Her images and essays have been published in numerous journals, including River Teeth, carte blanche, Ponder, and The Normal School.

Chapbook Contest Judge

It is our pleasure to announce that award-winning fiction writer Manuel Gonzales will choose the winning manuscript for the 2023 Maine Chapbook Series. Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he teaches writing and literature at Bennington College. He is also a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Gonzales lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children. 

Chapbook Winner

Critically-acclaimed poet Joshua Bennett has chosen Sasha Goodwin’s Centipede as the winner of the 2022 Maine Chapbook Series in poetry. Manuscripts by Samaa Abdurraqib, Mike Bove, Robert Carr, Michaela Cowgill, Jay Franzel, Tasha Graff, Beth Jones, Judy Kaber, Glenn Morazzini, Jennifer Ryan Onken, and Jonathan Pessant 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 poets who have won Maine Literary Awards, and then in a smaller second round by Bennett.

Goodwin’s chapbook will be published in the early fall of 2023 with editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.

At the beginning of the pandemic Sasha Goodwin (at left) moved back to Maine after thirty mostly good years in Seattle. She grew up in Pownal and lives in Auburn with two black cats and a young pit mix named Cheddar. In 2017 she completed an MFA in Creative Writing through the Pacific University low-residency program in Oregon. 

Chapbook Contest Judge

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2021, he received the Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.

Bennett has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.

Bennett’s writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Cover Contest

We are excited to announce that Elizabeth Snowdon is the winner of the Chapbook Cover Contest. One of her images will appear on the cover of Sasha Goodwin’s Centipede, which will be released in the fall.

Elizabeth Snowdon is a collage and mixed-mixed media artist based in Brunswick. Snowdon graduated from Bowdoin College with degrees in visual arts and English with a concentration in creative writing. She writes, “My collages aim to blur the lines between the real and the imagined and to engage the viewer in the intersection between the natural and human worlds. I use collage as a ‘mad-scientist’ method of creation, using familiar images to compose unfamiliar forms. I’m particularly drawn to mid-century images, as they seem simultaneously dated, while glorifying a new age of technology & exploration. These images, in concert with botanical and/or biological imagery, call forth ideas of hybridization, genetic modification, but also perhaps of a b-movie from a forgotten time.”

Chapbook Cover Art

We are excited to announce that this year's winner of the Maine Chapbook Series Cover Contest is Jessica Myer, an emerging studio artist based in Portland. Jessica will receive a $500 prize and five copies of Coco McCracken's chapbook The Rabbit, when it appears early next fall.

In 2013 Jessica Myer earned her MFA in illustration with a concentration in children's books, but only within the past six months has she fully devoted her working hours to a studio practice. She has an extensive background in fine art gallery management and has been an arts educator sporadically throughout the past ten years. Her work has been in publications such as Mindful Magazine and The Maine Arts Journal, and exhibited at The Children's Museum & Theatre of Maine, June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Vestibule 594, UMVA Gallery, and Greenhut Galleries. In addition to being an artist, Jessica is a mother, wife and homemaker who is expecting her second child in late spring. She loves eating at the wonderful restaurants Portland has to offer, getting away with her family, and tackling home projects.

Chapbook Cover Art

We are pleased to announce that artist Shawn Rice’s two images “Drawn To” and “The Way Home” have been selected as the winner of the 2020 Maine Chapbook Series Cover Art Contest. One or both of Rice’s images will appear on the cover of Brandon Dudley’s chapbook, Hazards of Nature: Stories, and Rice will receive a $500 award as well as five copies of the published chapbook. Many thanks to all of the artists who submitted their work for consideration.

Shawn Rice was born and raised in the Lewiston-Auburn area. The son and grandson of painters, he was influenced early by the artists in his life. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Art Education from the University of Maine, where he served as Founder and President of the Student Art League and Assistant to the Director of the University of Maine Museum of Art. Since graduating, he has taught art in grades K-12 in public schools where he continues to teach courses in Drawing, Painting, Photography, Photoshop, Filmmaking and Broadcast Media. He was named the 2019 Androscoggin County Teacher of the Year and State semifinalist. He enjoys drawing, painting, pinhole photography and printmaking as well as digital illustration. He has been involved in the local arts community through film festivals, art walks, gallery exhibitions and by serving on a local public art committee. Rice is a lifelong musician who plays multiple instruments and has recently continued his studies in flatpicking traditional music through the oral tradition. A lover of nature, he and his family escape regularly to the white mountains.

Chapbook Judge

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her eighth novel, What Are You Going Through, is forthcoming in September from Riverhead Books. In a starred review, Kirkus notes the novel is “concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering? Dryly funny and deeply tender; draining and worth it.”

Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her work has either been or is being translated into more than twenty languages. Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Currently teaching at Boston University, she has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country.

Chapbook Winner

MWPA is happy to announce that poet Martha Collins chose Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone as the winner of the Maine Chapbook Series for 2019! Langlois’s chapbook was published in 2020. Many thanks to the many poets who sent in their wonderful work for the Maine Chapbook Series contest. Many thanks to Douglas W. Milliken for his cover image, Pink Eraser Press for their design work, and Walch Printing.

To order a copy of Bright Glint Gone, please visit Kelly’s Books to Go and click on “Featured Book” in the navigation menu at the top of the page, contact your local bookstore to order a copy, or find it on Bookshop.org.

Suzanne Langlois’s poems have appeared in The Maine Review, NAILED Magazine, Cider Press Review, The Fourth River, Off The Coast, Rattle, and on the Button Poetry channel. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Independent Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Portland and teaches high school English in Falmouth.

Chapbook Cover Art

Huge thanks to the more than fifty visual artists who submitted their work for the Maine Chapbook Series cover art contest. We are pleased to announce that “Solo,” a composite photograph by Douglas W. Milliken, has been chosen as the winner of the contest. Milliken’s striking image, which he describes as “a photograph layering three different source images through the use of some super-obsolete imaging software from the 90s,” will adorn the cover of Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook Bright Glint Gone. Milliken receives a $500 prize and five copies of the chapbook.

Douglas W. Milliken is a writer, performer, and artist living in the Saco River Valley. He’s the author of two novels, a collection of stories, and several of collaborative multi-media projects, and is the recipient of awards from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Glimmer Train, the Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere.

Chapbook Judge

Award-winning poet, translator, and editor Martha Collins judged the 2019 Maine Chapbook Series contest. Collins has published nine books of poetry, most recently Night Unto Night (Milkweed, 2018) and Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), as well four volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. Founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin from 1997 till 2007. Because What Else Could I Do is forthcoming in the Pitt Poetry Series in September 2019. 

“A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Martha Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century in supple and complex poems. Those who have followed Collins’ books have long since realized that no subject is off limits for her piercing intellect.” —AWP Chronicle

Ruth Mendelson, Sixteen Pastorals, Theodore Press, 1983; Selected by Philip Booth

Rebecca Cummings, Kaisa Kilponen, Coyote Love Press, 1984; Selected by George Garrett

Robert Chute, Samuel Sails for Home, Coyote Love Press, 1986; Selected by Charles Simic

Christopher Fahy, One Day in the Short Happy Life of Anna Banana, Coastwise Press, 1988; Selected by Mary McCarthy

Kenneth Rosen, The Hebrew Lion, Ascensius Press, 1989; Selected by Amy Clampitt

Denis Ledoux, Mountain Dance, Coastwise Press, 1990; Selected by Elizabeth Hardwick

Besty Sholl, Pick a Card, Coyote/Bark Publications, 1991; Selected by Donald Hall

John A.S. Rogers, The Elephant on the Tracks and Other Stories, Muse Press, 1994; Selected by David Huddle

Candice Stover, Holding Patterns, Muse Press, 1994; Selected by Mary Oliver

Sis Deans, Decisions and Other Stories, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, 1995; Selected by Cathie Pelletier

Peter Harris, Blue Hallelujahs, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, 1996; Selected by Roland Flint

Rhea Cote Robbins, Wednesday’s Child, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, 1997; Selected by Sven Birkerts

Ellen Bryan Obed, A Letter From the Snow, Maine Author’s Publishing, 1999; Selected by Lois Lowry

Special thanks to the Maine Arts Commission, the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust, and the Nichols Fund for their support of the Maine Chapbook Series.