Tupelo Press Announces the Results of the 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Prize

Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Denise Duhamel, has selected Night Logic by Matthew Gellman of Brooklyn, New York as the winner of the 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Prize! Matthew will receive a cash award of $1,000 in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 25 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion. All manuscripts are judged anonymously. 

Matthew Gellman’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Narrative, The Common, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight and elsewhere. A recipient of a Brooklyn Poets fellowship and an Academy of American Poets prize, Matthew was a finalist for Narrative’s Tenth Annual Poetry Contest as well as The Missouri Review’s 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize, and he was awarded the Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholarship in 2020. His manuscript, Beforelight, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ 2019 Berkshire Prize, for Four Way Books’ 2020 Levis Prize, and for the 2020 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Matthew holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in New York City, where he works in elder care and teaches at Hunter College and the Fashion Institute of Technology.


Judge’s Citation

“Night Logic is an exquisite suite of poems rendering a family challenged by loss. In the aftermath, a young son becomes a de facto father to his younger brother. And a mother becomes a tragic and heroic figure. Matthew Gellman illuminates this dark domestic space while the speaker of these poems struggles with bullying, violence and his own sexuality. The poems in Night Logic are both mythic and grounded, formidable in their affection and insight.”

–Denise Duhamel

Our sincere congratulations to Matthew Gellman, and all our finalists and semifinalists. 


Finalists for the 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Prize


Eric Burger of Longmont, Colorado, Sizzle

Eric Burger has received fellowships/awards from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Wesleyan Writers Conference, and Writers at Work. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review Online, Best New Poets 2011, Indiana Review, Rattle, Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Court Green, among others. He teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and lives in Longmont, CO with his wife Katherine and children Willem and June.


Flower Conroy of Slidell, Louisiana, /ˈkälēˌflou(ə)r/ 

LGBTQ+ writer and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy is the author of the chapbooks Facts About Snakes & HeartsThe Awful Suicidal Swans, and Escape to Nowhere. Her first full-length manuscript, Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder was chosen by Chen Chen as the winner of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ Stevens Manuscript Competition. Her poetry has appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals.


Kelly Hoffer of Ithaca, New York, The Claude Glass

Kelly Hoffer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry. She was recently a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Her work was recognized as a finalist for the 2017 American Literary Review Award in poetry and as a finalist for the 2018 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BathHouse Journal, Radar PoetryTurbine/Kapohau, The Bennington Review, and Hubbub. She is currently a PhD student in English at Cornell University, and so she lives in Ithaca, NY, very close to a waterfall.


John James of Louisville, Kentucky, The Delusion of Being Absolute

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize (Milkweed, 2019). He is also the author of Chthonic, winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Award. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN America, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A digital collagist, his image-text experiments appear in Quarterly West, The Adroit Journal, and LIT.

Also a scholar, John writes on poetry and poetics from 1740 to the present. He has presented papers at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and NAVSA’s 2017 Victorian Preserves conference in Banff, Alberta. His current project, tentatively titled “Made Future,” investigates the science, technology, and manufactured environments of the British eighteenth century.

His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is pursuing a PhD in English and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.


Jasmine Khaliq of Brentwood, California, Facefull 

Jasmine Khaliq is a Pakistani Mexican American poet born, raised, and based in Northern California. Her poetry is found or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, GASHER, phoebe,Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University, where she won the 2017 Tillie Olsen Award for Socially Conscious Writing, and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle, where she was runner-up for the 2018 Richard J. Dunn First-Year Teaching Award. A finalist for the 2021 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, she is an incoming PhD student at University of Utah this Fall and a reader for Split Lip Magazine.


Naomi Mulvihill of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, The Knife Thrower’s Girl 

Naomi Mulvihill was a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, in 2014. Her poems have been published in the Green Mountains ReviewCutBankNew Orleans ReviewWest Branch, and others, and featured on Verse Daily. She is a bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools.


Glenn Shaheen of Houston, Texas, The Tender Land 

Glenn Shaheen is the Arab-Canadian author of four books, most recently the flash fiction collection Carnivalia (Gold Wake Press, 2018). His book of poems, Predatory, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was the finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award. It is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is also the author of the chapbook of flash fiction, Unchecked Savagery, available from Ricochet Editions. His second collection of poetry, Energy Corridor, is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and was published in 2016. 


Bret Shepard of Tacoma, Washington, ABSENT HERE

Bret Shepard, originally from Alaska, has lived throughout the Pacific and Arctic coasts. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Cabrini University with a PhD from the University of Nebraska. Recipient of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, recent poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Place Where Presence Was, winner of the 2019 Moon City Press Book Award for Poetry, as well as two chapbooks, including The Territorial, which recently won the 2020 Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review.


Alan Soldofsky of San Jose, California, Charts (For the End of Days) 

Alan Soldofsky’s most recent poetry collection is In the Buddha Factory (Truman State, 2013). Recent poems appear in Catamaran, december, DMQ Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, The North American Review, and elswhere Other publications include three chapbooks: Kenora Station (1976); Staying Home (1977 Folio Edition); and Holding Adam/My Father’s Books (2003 joint chapbook with his son Adam Soldofsky). With an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1972, he is a professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State University where I he serves as Director of Creative Writing.


Nicholas Yingling of Martinez, California, The Thin Book 

Nicholas Yingling’s work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Nimrod, and others. He was longlisted for the Frontier Chapbook Contest and an honorable mention in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series.


Congratulations also to our outstanding roster of semi-finalists. Read more about our semi-finalists here.

Enormous thanks as well to our terrific readers and judge, Denise Duhamel, who is the author of Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Our heart-felt gratitude goes out to all who sent us your manuscripts and who, by your writing, link arms in the tireless, solitary, and so-important work of making poetry. So many more manuscripts than we can mention here gave us countless hours of reading pleasure.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we hope you will consider letting us see your manuscript again, as our July Open Submission Period will open this summer. Thank you and we look forward to reading your work!