Tupelo Press Announces the Semi-Finalists for the 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Prize

Emma Aylor of Lubbock, Texas, Hydronym

Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared in 32 PoemsThe Cincinnati ReviewPleiadesNorthwest Review, and Fairy Tale Review, among other journals. The winner of Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets and a finalist for Narrative’s Twelfth Annual Poetry Contest, she holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MFA from the University of Washington–Seattle. She grew up in Bedford County, Virginia, and lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD student in creative writing and literature at Texas Tech University.


David Brunson of Fredericksburg, Virginia, Fault Lines

David Brunson is a poetry and translation MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. The recipient of a Sturgis International Fellowship and Lily Peter Fellowship in Translation, he spent eight months in Santiago, Chile during the 2019-2020 Chilean Social Crisis, where he compiled and translated the poems of seventeen Venezuelan poets who have migrated to Chile. He serves as the Poetry in Translation Editor for The Arkansas International. His poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International WritingNashville ReviewCopper NickelThe Literary Review, and Los Poetas del 5. Translations of his poetry into Spanish have appeared in or are forthcoming from Los Poetas del 5 and the University of Chile Press. He is the editor and anthologist of a Spanish-language anthology of Venezuelan migrant poets in Chile, forthcoming from Libros del Amanecer in Santiago, Chile.


Wenmimareba Klobah Collins of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Dowsing

Wenmimareba Klobah Collins is a San Juan, Puerto Rico-based writer. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Literature, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and Critical Visual Studies. She’s a graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop for young SFFH Writers and teens (2017 & 2018), as well as a finalist for the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Her work can be found in The Dark and in the Akashic Books Duppy Thursday series of Caribbean stories.


Graham Foust of Denver, Colorado, Terminations

Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Wisconsin. He earned his BA from Beloit College, MFA from George Mason University, and PhD from SUNY-Buffalo. Foust once noted that he is “generally uncomfortable with comfort in poetry,” and his work has received praise for its uncompromising, even dark, blend of humor, allusion, and metaphysical investigation. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including As in Every Deafness (2003); Leave the Room to Itself (2003), which won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Necessary Stranger (2007); A Mouth in California (2009); and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (2013). With Samuel Frederick, Foust co-translated the German poet Ernst Meister’s In Time’s Rift (2012). Foust’s essays and writing have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Jacket, and TriQuarterly. He has taught at Saint Mary’s College of California and at the University of Denver.


Jayson Keery of Holyoke, Massachusetts, Leave Her Alone

Jayson Keery is a writer, editor and arts coordinator who lives on Nonotuck land in Western Massachusetts. They completed their MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where they studied with poets Peter Gizzi, Ocean Vuong, Cameron Awkward-Rich and CAConrad. They are the former assistant managing editor of jubilat; the host the Majestic Queer Lit Club reading series; and the poetry curator of the HUT reading series in Northampton. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Overheard, The New Guard, Metatron Press, b l u s h, Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Girls Like Us, and has been anthologized in Nightboat Books’ We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics and Pilot Press London’s A Queer Anthology of Rage. They are the recipient of the 2021 Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship, judged by Wendy Xu; a finalist for the 2021 Knightville Poetry Contest; and the runner up for the 2019 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award, judged by Diana Khoi Nguyen.


Derek Mong of Crawfordsville, Indiana, Midnight Arrhythmia

Derek Mong is the author of two collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (2018)—and a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (Two Sylvias Press, 2017). As a critic, he reviews new work for the Gettysburg Review and blogs at the Kenyon Review Online. His collaborative translations of the Russian poet Maxim Amelin—made with his wife, the translator, Anne O. Fisher—have appeared widely, receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2010. Their manuscript, The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelinwon the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Prize and appeared with White Pine Press in the fall of 2018. His own essays and poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, PleiadesCrazyhorseThe Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, New England ReviewPoetry Northwest, the Southern Review, and many other publications.


Laura Mulqueen of Birmingham, Alabama, Fear Structure

Laura Mulqueen earned an MA in English from Auburn University. She was awarded the 2019 Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Prize in Poetry by the Academy of American Poets, judged by Tina Mozelle Braziel and has work forthcoming in Wilderness House Literary Review. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her son.


Antonina Palisano of Somerville, Massachusetts, Axiom For When The Stars Go Out

Antonina Palisano’s poetry has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, Best New Poets, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from Boston University.


Genevieve Pfeiffer of Scarsdale, New York, This Is A Form Of Begging

Genevieve Pfeiffer is a poet, herbalist, and teacher. They are the Assistant Director at Anomaly. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in Frost Meadow Review, Quail Bell Magazine, Birdcoat Quartlerly, Juked, So to Speak, The Write Room, and others. They oscillate between NYC and the mountains, and you can find them where there are trees.


Elizabeth A.I. Powell of Underhill, Vermont, A Declaration of Sentiments

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, the latest Atomizer from LSU Press. Powell’s work has appeared recently in American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Seneca Review, and West Branch. She teaches at Northern Vermont University and is Editor of Green Mountains Review.


Gaia Rajan of Mason, Ohio, Killing It 

Gaia Rajan is the cofounder of the WOC Speak Reading Series, the Junior Journal Editor for Half Mystic, the Web Manager for Honey Literary, the Managing Editor of The Courant, and the Poetry Editor of Saffron Literary. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Muzzle Magazine, DIALOGIST, Split Lip Magazine, diode, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Moth Funerals, is out now from Glass Poetry Press. You can find her online at gaiarajanwrites.com, or at @gaia_writes on Twitter.


TC Tolbert of Tucson Arizona, The Quiet Practices 

TC Tolbert identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, mover, and poet. And, s/he’s a human in love with humans doing human things. S/he is author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014 and to be re-released in 2021 by Nightboat Books), five chapbooks, and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books 2013). TC was recently awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellowship for his work with trans, non-binary, and queer folks as Tucson’s Poet Laureate. www.tctolbert.com