Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Hala Alyan, has selected Country Songs for Alice by Emma Binder of Madison, Wisconsin as the winner of the 2022 Snowbound Chapbook Prize! Emma 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 were judged anonymously.
Emma Binder is a writer from Wisconsin. They received their MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and were the 2020 – 2021 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Their fiction and poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Narrative, The Texas Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. They currently live in Western Massachusetts.
Judge’s Citation
“In COUNTRY SONGS FOR ALICE, the author has woven a collection that marries music and love poems. These pieces are ferocious with love, ablaze with it, invoking a world of deserts and horses, rodeos and sunsets, lizards and open roads. With no one around / you can be anything: animal, mineral, / cloud pattern, blade. The same can be said of these poems: whittled with love, transforming from song to stanza to memory across the page. If you want to come to my house, I’ll let you in, the chapbook begins. I’m glad to have been invited.”
–Hala Alyan
Our sincere congratulations to Emma Binder, and to all our finalists and semifinalists.
Finalists for the 2022 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.
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.
Keith Leonard of Columbus, Ohio
& Matthew Kelsey of Chicago, Illinois
In the Palace of Forgetting
Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mainer/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Believer, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Matthew Kelsey is from Glens Falls, NY. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a teaching fellowship from the Kenyon Review Young Writers Program, and an Idyllwild Arts Writers Week Fellowship. He currently lives in Chicago.
Adrian Lürssen of Mill Valley, California
INCOMING
Born and raised in South Africa, Adrian Lürssen live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lürssen’s chapbook NEOWISE is now out from Trainwreck Press. Lürssen’s full-length manuscript, HUMAN IS TO WANDER, from which this work is excerpted was selected by Gillian Conoley for the 2022 Colorado prize for Poetry and will be published in November. Lürssen’s poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Fence, Phoebe, Indiana Review, American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, and places elsewhere.
Nathan Rosenthalis of New York, New York
Machoville
Nathaniel Rosenthalis is a poet and critic, whose work has appeared in frequently in Lana Turner and in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Chicago Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of three chapbooks, including the forthcoming 24 Hour Air (PANK Books, 2022). He lives in New York City, where he teaches writing at NYU, Columbia University, Baruch College, and Fordham University. He is also a singer and performer who recently made his Off-Broadway debut.
Vyxz Vasquez of Quezon City, Philippines
Pensionados
Vyxz Vasquez is currently a first-year PhD student of literature at UC San Diego.
Karla Van Vliet of Bristol, Vermont
Bone Scribed
Karla Van Vliet’s newest books are She Speaks in Tongues (Anhinga Press), a collection of poems and asemic writings, and Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings (Shanti Arts).
She is a Forward Prize, a three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, nominee. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine and others. Van Vliet is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal. She is an Integrative Dreamwork analyst, and administrator of the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College.
Zoë Ryder White of Gardiner, New York
Via Post
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Salamander, Thrush, Plume, Sixth Finch, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored a chapbook, A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Elsewhere, their most recent collaboration, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.
He Xiang of New York, New York
Emperor Penguins on the Square
He Xiang lived in Beijing as a child. Poems from this collection received the Strousse Poetry Award from Prairie Schooner, and have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and The Rumpus.
Semifinalists for the 2022 Snowbound Chapbook Award
Lois Anne of Rockland, Maine. LION TAMING.
C.S. Carrier of Indianapolis, Indiana. What I Think of When I Come Home.
Cynie Cory of Tallahassee, Florida. Let It Come Down.
M. Cynthia Cheung of Houston, Texas. Occurance of a Dream Translated by Animals.
Jonathan Chou of Boston, Massachusetts. Pomes.
Stella Corso of Denver, Colorado. Valentine’s Day.
Joseph Felkers of Caledonia, Michigan. BALTOTRASH.
Steve McDonald of Murrieta, California. like some kind of god.
Abigail Minor of Aaronsburg, Pennsylvania. Rhythm Make a Riot.
Christopher Nelson of Grinnell, Iowa. The Principle of the Knot.
Sahar Romani of Jackson Heights, New York. The Opening.
Enormous thanks as well to our accomplished team of Preliminary Readers and our final judge, Hala Alyan, who is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
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!