Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce that Sunni Wilkinson’s chapbook, The Ache & The Wing, was selected by Esteban Rodriguez as the winner of our ninth annual chapbook competition. Wilkinson will receive $200 and publication. Sundress plans to release the chapbook in late 2020.
Esteban Rodriguez, contest judge and author of the forthcoming collection The Valley (Sundress 2021), had this to say about the chapbook:
“Lyrical and elegiac, this collection boldly explores a range of personal tragedies and uncertainties—the unexpected death of a son, the memory of a mother leaving, the realization that life had different plans than were originally conceived. As the speaker so succinctly states, “I don’t want another love story. / I want immortality,” but if immortality is off the table, then let us sit with a collection that page after page does everything it can to provide an authentic space to heal.”
Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sou’wester and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and winner of New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three young sons.
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara’s I know the Origin of my Tremor and Allyson Whipple’s This Must be the Place were also selected as runners-up.
We are also excited to announce that Ugochukwu Damian Okpara’s chapbook, I Know the Origin of My Tremor, was also selected for publication and will receive the $100 Editor’s Award. A Nigerian writer and poet, Ugochukwu’s work appears or is forthcoming in African Writer, Barren Magazine, The Penn Review, and elsewhere.
The entire Sundress team would like to thank everyone who sent in their work. Finalists and semi-finalists include:
Finalists
OF TUNEFUL ROT, Prince Bush
Literary Self-Portraits of an Americanized Migrant, Natalie Cortez-Klossner
BREAKING WATER, Karen Llagas
Field Notes Recovered from the Expedition to Devil’s Peak, Laura A. Ring
Blur, Katherine Vanderme
Semifinalists
wash between your toes, Teni Ayo-Ariyo
Parent. Worshipper. Carrion, Stella Hervey Birrell
TACKY LITTLE NOTHING, Chelsea Margaret Bodnar
Small Girl: Micromemoirs, Lisa Fay Coutley
Feralandia, Nicole Arocho Hernández
As Things Developed, She Was to Have All Manner of Revelation, Elizabeth Devlin
Silencio, No Mas, Adrian Ernesto
Measurable Terms, Arlyn LaBelle
Massive and Newly Dead, Rebecca Martin
Object Permanence, Jeni De La O
Kaitumjaure, Laurence O’Dwyer
What Shot Did You Ever Take, Brian Oliu & Jason McCall
Harridan, Melissa Tyndall
between virus & police, ar young
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