Pre-Orders for Our 2023 Broadside Now Open

Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce that pre-orders for our 2023 broadside contest winner are now open. Kenzie Allen’s poem, “Love Song to the Man Announcing Pow Wows and Rodeos,” will be letterpress-printed at the Sundress Academy for the Arts as a limited edition 8.5” x 11” broadside.

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Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist; she is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Kenzie is a recipient of a 92 NY Discovery Prize, the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and the Littoral Press Prize, as well as fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work can be found in Poetry, Boston Review, Narrative, Poets.org, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she is currently an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing at York University in Toronto.

The broadside edition combines Kenzie Allen’s work with an original piece by artist Lori Tennant. The poem “Love Song to the Man Announcing Pow Wows and Rodeos” first appeared in Narrative.

Order your copy today for $5 off the retail price!

Sundress Publications Closes on 11/30 for Poetry Broadside Contest

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce that we are now open for submissions for our annual poetry broadside contest. The contest will be open for submission until November 30th, 2023.

The winner’s poem will be letterpress-printed as an 8.5” x 11” broadside complete with custom art and made available for sale on our online store. The winner will receive $200 and 20 copies of their broadside. 

To submit, send up to three poems, no longer than 28 lines each (line limit includes stanza breaks but not the title), in one Word or PDF document to sundresscontest@gmail.com by November 30, 2023. Be sure to include a copy of your payment receipt or purchase order number (see below for payment of fees). Please make sure that no identifying information is included in the submitted poems. You can submit poems online here.

The reading fee is $10 per batch of three poems, though the fee will be waived for entrants who purchase or pre-order any Sundress title. Entrants can place book orders or pay submission fees at our store. Once the purchase is made, the store will send a receipt with a purchase code. This code should be included in the submission, or you may forward the email receipt at the same time as you send the submission. This fee is waived for all writers of color.

Previously published material is welcome so long as you maintain the rights to the work. Let us know in your cover letter if any of your submitted poems have been previously published. 

Poems translated from another language will not be accepted. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we ask that authors notify us immediately if their work has been accepted elsewhere; poems accepted for publication are still qualified provided the author retains the rights to the work at the time of printing.

Submit poems online here.


This contest’s judge is Darren C. Demaree. Darren C. Demaree grew up in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He is a graduate of the College of Wooster, Miami University, and Kent State University. He is the author of twenty poetry collections, most recently Tongues Out in the Garden of Spectacle (August 2023, Newcomer Press). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system, and living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. 

Sundress Publications is Open for Microgrant Applications for Palestinian Writers

Sundress Publications is open for submissions for grant applications from Palestinian identifying writers with a chapbook or full-length collection in progress. All eligible authors are welcome to submit during our application period which closes on December 31st, 2023. Applicants may apply for any genre.

The Sundress Microgrant for Palestinian Writers will award $500, a slot in Sundress’s reading series, a one-week residency at the Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN, and the potential for publication to one writer of Palestinian descent with a chapbook or full-length in progress to support the completion of said project. 

All applications will be read by members of our editorial board. One writer will be selected, who will then work with Sundress’s reading series coordinator, residency team, and editorial board.

To apply, please send a sample of the work in progress along with a brief (no more than 500 words) artist/personal statement about what this grant would mean to the completion of said work. These items should be sent to our editorial board as DOCX or PDF files at sundresspublications@gmail.com. Please include the phrase “Sundress Microgrant for Palestinian Writers” in the subject line. There is no fee to apply.

Doubleback Books Announces the Release of Michael Meyerhofer’s What To Do If You’re Buried Alive

Doubleback Books announces the release of Michael Meyerhofer’s What To Do If You’re Buried Alive. The poems in this collection are tenderly masculine, self-deprecating and humorous. They are the poems of an adult male poet looking back at childhood and puberty with anything  but rose-colored glasses. He shows us how we see ourselves often through time—with a mixture of cringe and understanding.

Mary Biddinger, author of A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, writes, “With a compassionate eye, and his trademark sense of humor that hooks readers from the very first page, Meyerhofer sends us back to our earliest memories, and shows us a world of heartbreak and wonder.” And Jon Tribble, author of Natural State, adds “Through pain and loss, Meyerhofer’s poems are harrowing prayers searching for ‘the charms of language’ that might lead to forgiveness, to redemption, to love.”

Download your copy of What To Do If You’re Buried Alive today!

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five poetry books, six poetry chapbooks, and two fantasy trilogies. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Prize, the Whirling Prize, and other honors. He earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He grew up in Iowa, where he learned the value of reading novels, lifting weights, and not getting his hopes up. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review and lives in Fresno, California. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

Sundress Reads: Review of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family Review

Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press, 2019) is a masterful multimedia project that weaves together prose and craftsmanship, bringing light to buried historical narratives. While this is her second traditional prose book, Sauer also has multiple art books that demonstrate her experience with a wide variety of mediums, such as quilting, archiving other’s works, and stitching, specifically of clothing. Her writing is skillful, untangling her family’s history, but it merely accompanies the quilt she crafts throughout the book, the true star of the show. This quilt serves as a work of healing as she begins to reconcile the history all around her. 

From the first paragraph, Sauer establishes the idea of quilting as suture, a word typically used for stitches used to hold a wound together. Her first chapter, “Patchwork” opens with pictures of the messy back stitching of something Sauer has sewed. Counterposing these images, Sauer moves readers to Rio, one of the many places the author has lived through her travels. She describes the city as hungry, its sharp mouths constantly searching for bones and blood. She writes, “I bump into one on the way to buy groceries and it slices my arm. I hold the cut with my opposing hand and an incision form from the inside of my skin, letting air in but no blood out” (Sauer 4). Sauer uses suture here to refer to her attempts to find healing via crafting. 

She returns to the concept again on page 103, acknowledging that she can not be the first woman to make this connection. Sauer always makes sure to credit those who came before, saying, “Education, I find, has less to do with knowing things and more to do with the crafting and recrafting of oneself” (Sauer 104). She references Dr. Gladys-Marie Fy’s Preface to Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South, which documents how slave women would quilt their diaries due to being denied traditional educations.

As a whole, Almonds are Members of the Peach Family pulls historical vignettes through time. Sauer carefully intertwines the story of her grandparents with her own life. Their lives mostly exist in Nevada County, California, where readers are introduced to the version of her grandmother, or Billimae, that Sauer is most familiar with—the caretaker: “She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells the child to eat, to help herself to more” (Sauer 8). Sauer’s writing peels back these small, tender moments for readers to reveal their quiet intimacy. 

The descriptions are transparently honest, transitioning from the above heart-wrenching moment of connection between a younger Sauer and her grandmother, to her grandmother’s description of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband. The transition is jarring, laying out her Grandpa’s veteran status and referencing a friend once saying, “‘Where is my purple heart? My father got one in Vietnam, but what about the rest of us who still have to fight the war he brought back home?’” (Sauer 9). The audience isn’t spared her grandparents’ suffering, and by the end of the section readers are primed to see Sauer coping by way of the sound of her sewing machine. 

The collection expands as it continues, becoming less interdisciplinary and more plain prose as Sauer tells Billimae’s tale. Here, the writing is truly given a chance to breathe comfortably, showcasing every side of Billimae, even the uglier ones. “It is family shorthand to call Grandma crazy. The screaming, the secrets, the lies, the sneaking of sweet things into hidden places all over the house, into her mouth. The cussing at and blaming of Grandpa for everything,” Sauer explains (59). The family villainizes this woman in her old age, some waving away any mention of domestic abuse towards her as fabricated. Sauer writes, “Now, Grandma is crazy because calling her this is easier on us. Pinning it on the woman excuses our own complicity in the normalizing of her pain” (59). She criticizes this simplification of everything her grandmother is, recognizing the depth in her past that has shaped her into who she is now. 

Sauer is constantly reckoning with her history and family lineage, crafting and writing in an attempt to find some kind of answer. Between stories, readers watch her turn “pulp into pages… stitch linen thread between their creases and bind them to one another” (Sauer 71). Her language around the act is gorgeous, finding imagery in the household chores she idolizes through her words, reclaiming work that patriarchal society deems less than. For example, “I haul up bones from the river and sit, listen to the screaming left in them. I hold up each bone to the light, wipe it clean of debris, realign it back into its skeletal form” (Sauer 146). While her word choice turns morbid at points, it only adds to the passion behind her work and her desire to make something of it all.

Things do not end for Sauer here. After uncovering the bones from the graveyard, one can never truly be the same. Seams weaken over time, and eventually they’ll need to be reinforced: “I wake up late (6:50am), read for a few hours. I make coffee, toast a slice of bread, scrub the sink with borax, shoo away ants, re-hang the quilt, write in my slip, alternate between pushing back and suturing a heartache” (Sauer 149). In the face of it all, though, what Sauer has to do, and what we all have to do, is keep on living. 

Almonds are Members of the Peach Family is available from Noemi Press


Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College, with a specific interest in screenwriting. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. He currently works as an intern for Sundress Publications, and a reader for journals such as hand picked poetry, PRISM international, and Alien Magazine. You can find more of their work on their website, at https://izzyastuto.weebly.com/. Their Instagram is izzyastuto2.0 and Twitter is adivine_tragedy. 

Sundress Publications Seeks Craft Chaps Fiction Editor

Sundress Publications is now open for applications for our Craft Chaps Fiction Editor. Craft Chaps offers substantive essays by contemporary writers on creative writing practice. Each chap focuses on one aspect of craft and contains a writing exercise and bibliography for further reading. They are freely downloadable on our website.

Our fiction editor’s responsibilities primarily include soliciting one author for the series each year, editing the author’s craft chap, delivering the final product to the managing editor in a timely fashion, and working with the managing editor to make sure that it is released and promoted.

We are looking for applicants with the following qualities:

  • Knowledge of contemporary fiction and prominent authors
  • Strong editorial skills including both line edits and proofing
  • Good communication skills
  • Ability to self-start on projects
  • Great time-management and attention to deadlines

Applicants are welcome to telecommute and therefore are not restricted to living in any particular location.

Sundress Publications is staffed entirely by volunteers, so this position, as with all positions at the press, is unpaid. Craft Chap editors will receive a small honorarium for their work each year.

To apply, please send a CV and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to Executive Director Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com. Applications are due by December 1, 2023.

Sundress Reads: Review of Dire Moon Cartoons

John Sullivan’s book, Dire Moon Cartoons (Weasel Press 2021), is an experimental collection of dramas mixes poetry and history lessons with drama to reflect the dangers of imbalances in power and insufficient empathy. Often through straightforward explanations of his work, Sullivan describes this new form as “Poetry, spoken word, and non-realistic/devised theatre are mutually-reinforcing, complementary forms, and the montage process jump-starts a cross-fertilization that often produces really interesting hybrids” (11). The dramatic format lends itself as pedagogical; poetic language captures the attention of mind and soul, ensuring the readers are attuned to Sullivan’s message.

In the first play, “Hey Fritz, Looks Like You Lost It All Again in the Ghosting,” Sullivan reimagines life after death. Memory is a constant figure in many minds; this idea that sticks around for the entirety of the book, personified by various characters’ struggles to achieve “amnesia,” as Sullivan puts it. Fritz Lang, a famous German filmmaker of the 20th century who fled Germany just before WWII and the play’s protagonist, begins with a lamentation. Death is not what he thought it would be: “What dreams may come, indeed,” he says, “Hamlet was right to worry” (Sullivan 16). Even in innocence, even in death, Lang is followed by the memories of this violent past. Lang’s inability to forget the atrocities committed in his home country, even when he had no hand in them, is the main motivator of his guilt-ridden afterlife. Sullivan subsequently reminds readers to hold themselves accountable for crimes against humanity, even as spectators, setting up the rest of the book as a sort of guide on how to (or how not to) lose oneself in empathy.

Sullivan often employs poetic language to set the scene. For example, Fritz Lang describes where he was when the war started, saying, “I was in Los Angeles, then, eating lotus, sucking skin, drinking in the sun, bobbing up and down in the surf like a postcard” (Sullivan 17). Fritz has some stored regret, perhaps survivor’s guilt, from the war. He got out. He’s practically on vacation. But how many millions of people did he leave behind? By using the Brechtian technique in his plays, Sullivan separates the audience from the action, reminding the reader that he intends for someone to learn from this language. Sullivan wants his readers to be aware they are spectating, making things personal.

Each section/scene of the book offers an artful look into the atrocities performed by those traditionally in power: Fritz gets new ears to “hear and do what he’s told to do” (32), actors are treated as props (32), and the “Mad Town Jump Rope Chant” offers another look at commonly used brainwashing techniques (33). Fritz Lang even offers a preparatory remark: “We should all have eyes all around our heads” (61), reminding the reader to pay attention to what’s going on around the world, not only to what they currently see.

As mentioned above, Sullivan discusses “amnesia” (67) as a way to avoid looking at reality head-on. He expertly captures the juxtaposition between what we are told by those in positions of power (i.e. propaganda) and what we can observe ourselves. For example, when the Mouse Van Gogh from the Big White Chair cannot get the “Helmut of Amnesia” over his “big dumb polyethylene ears” (Sullivan 73), he is forced to hear and remember all the violence that follows and all that came before. Over the course of the book, Sullivan also lays out the many ways people (and apparently mice) attempt to escape from reality. If it’s not amnesia, it’s substance abuse in the form of “the ultimate boss cannoli” (Sullivan 74) or objects of denial and power like Grey Sergeant’s “new-new eyes” and his “death wig” (Sullivan 123). When the Baby Rookie’s death is smeared on the white wall in The Baby’s Rookie Year, for example, denial transforms into a struggle to be remembered, even for heinous acts of violence.

Although Sullivan is critical of human actions, he is delicate in his treatment of said criticisms. His writing comes across as helpfully demonstrative and effectively engaging. Kookie word usage, fun sets and props, as well as wild, outlandish characters make for an informative, sometimes necessarily uncomfortable, but always entertaining set of dramas. Sullivan uses real human history to teach lessons on empathy, greed, power, and human nature; he tucks away the lessons in succinct humor and sarcasm interspersed with shocking acts of violence. And so, when Fritz Lang says, “I want a better history right here, right now…” (35), the reader feels it, too.

Dire Moon Cartoons is available through Weasel Press.


Blonde white woman smizes into camera.

Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

Sundress Publications Open for Microgrant Applications for Black and/or Indigenous Writers

Sundress Publications is open for submissions for grant applications from Black and/or Indigenous identifying writers with a chapbook in progress. All eligible authors are welcome to submit during our application period, which closes on October 31st, 2023. The Light Bill Incubator Microgrant will award $500, a slot in Sundress’s reading series, a one-week residency at the Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN, and the potential for digital publication to one Black and/or Indigenous writer with a chapbook in progress to support the completion of said project.

All applications will be read by members of our editorial board. One writer will be selected, who will then work with Sundress’s reading series coordinator, residency team, and editorial board.

Applicants may apply for any genre; however, the proposed project must be a chapbook-length project, meaning the planned final version will be fewer than 48 pages.

To apply, please send a sample of the chapbook in progress along with a brief (no more than 500 words) artist/personal statement. These items should be sent to our editorial board as DOCX or PDF files at sundresspublications@gmail.com. Please include the phrase “Light Bill Incubator Microgrant Application” in the subject line. There is no fee to apply.

Sundress Reads: Review of No Spare People

In No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), Erin Hoover immerses us readers in two different worlds—the intimately familial mother-daughter relationship and the external society of American reality. Within the walls of the home, “there are only two, no / spare people” (Hoover 78). Through this collection, however, we see the many ways patriarchal norms make some people feel “spare.”

Hoover widely explores what it means to be a woman in America, specifically the American South. In “White woman” she describes a reality where “some days, I’m the pioneer wife, / keeper of the homestead, but others / I’m absurdly educated for a uterus” (Hoover 43). I feel the impact of living in a post-Roe world through these poems. There is a frank portrayal of the ways in which a woman’s value, in many places, feels like it is measured by her reproductive potential. Hoover writes, “a woman / pregnant is a farm animal / only caring to alternate between trough / and pen. Treated as such / by doctors. How easily they could put away / a mother thought dangerous. For the baby” (46). As a woman of childbearing age, and as someone who has fielded frequent questions around my own hesitation to have children, I find Hoover’s frustration familiar. In sharing this speaker’s experience, women who hold their own fears around pregnancy can feel justified.

There is danger and violence lurking within these poems. For example, “Three weeks” is about the impact of the O.J Simpson trial on a fifteen year old speaker watching the verdict. Hoover writes, “I’d like to say I learned that day / about men who don’t think women / are people at all, / but I already knew, all over the country, / girls like me knew” (19). We live in a world where we read news story after story about violence against women. Additionally, a recent poll reported 64% of OBGYNs say the Dobbs ruling has increased pregnancy related mortality. As women in America, it is easy to feel that our safety is deprioritized; Hoover gives voice to this inequity.

Many of the poems from No Spare People hint at men being a primary cause of the danger women face. In “Forms and materials,” this blame is more explicitly stated. “Perhaps, in the shadow / of Dobbs v. Jackson, / I could use some distance from men” (Hoover 72). The distance the speaker craves seems to be a way for them to seek safety. This poem clearly states the potential consequences of interacting with men: “Dear sweet, please fit neatly / into our shared hetero void and behave / wife-like or we will fucking kill you / with celluloid and forced birth / and a fetus made into a god” (Hoover 72). In this sweeping eleven page poem, Hoover goes on to say:

“There is too much sperm in America, 

America is run by sperm, 

but the vial I bought sprung me 

from the Romance-Industrial Complex 

that kept me docile for many years, 

and as an exit fee, it worked” (73).

The speaker pays this exit fee in order to freely raise her child on her own, and many poems within No Spare People explore the life of a solo-parent. In “To be a mother in this economy,” the speaker is “not always home, / department store suit creased / into my luggage, phone jacked into an airport / wall, all those hotel stays hopeful for the job / on the horizon” (Hoover 58). We’ve heard of “mom guilt,” but Hoover distills these vague and overused ideas into a heartbreaking image. The poem ends with, “I wonder if my absence lives inside / her, if the babies are about that, / they are everything to her, these beloveds, / until she walks away” (Hoover 59). Mothers are expected to make their children their “everything,” and this poem expertly grapples with the struggle of being financially unable to fulfill the expectation as a single mother.

It would be far too neat to say Hoover paints the outside world as dangerous and the inside as a soft, safe haven. “But for the hours I didn’t care if I lived” is a poem about alcohol abuse and the impact it has on a parent’s ability to care for their child. Hoover writes, “I’ve not yet / told my daughter / to fear my nights, that while / she sleeps I disappear / into a grave I create, / evening by evening, / cover myself / with punishing dirt, / laugh like a sorceress, / and the next day climb out” (53). Yes, the speaker too can be a danger to her family, and she questions how parenting is often sold as a cure for our ailments: “Do we have children as a kind / of insurance, to guard / our minds like this, stop us / from ruining ourselves?” (Hoover 54). Hoover’s writing implies that even the noble act of parenting can’t save us from ourselves.

Throughout No Spare People, Hoover brings to light many unflattering truths about the maddening hypocrisy of our world. In “Death parade,” Hoover writes, “At first the pandemic was all of the things we couldn’t / have. Then, it just was. A cough was a harbinger of death. / Then, it was a cough” (22). Hoover brilliantly sheds light on all we have accepted as normal, the parts of life that have become what just is—parts that, when explored, are revealed to be anything but normal.

There is power in agency and in creating an authentic life, one that may be far from expectation. There is also so much pressure put on women to exist in a way that often includes a stereotypical family. As Hoover writes: “A perfect circle is hard to imagine / (except if you have imagination), / but it’s obvious: my daughter and I are / complete by ourselves.” (75). These poems seem to suggest that a sense of wholeness is possible once this societal pressure is shed.

No Spare People will be published by Black Lawrence Press in October 2023.


Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer. She earned her BA in English at the University of Connecticut and her MA in Teaching English from New York University. Jen lives, writes, and travels across the U.S. in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.

2023 E-Chapbook Contest Winner Announced

Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce that Heather Qin‘s chapbook, Nomad, was selected by Rita Mookerjee as the winner of our annual e-chapbook contest. Heather will receive $200 and publication.

A photo of the author of "Nomad," Heather Qin.

Heather Qin (she/her) is a writer from New Jersey. A Best of the Net nominee, her work has been recognized by The New York Times, Narrative, and Hollins University, and can be found or forthcoming in Sine Theta Magazine, Pidgeonholes, and Diode, among others. Besides writing, Heather loves classical music and reading.

We are also excited to announce that Moni Brar’s chapbook, Migrant Wish, was this year’s Editor’s Choice. Moni will receive $100 as well as publication.

A photo of the author of "Migrant Wish," Moni Brar.

Moni Brar was born in rural Punjab and raised on the land of the Tse’Khene peoples. Hailing from a long a lineage of illiterate subsistence farmers, she spends much of her time contemplating land, loss, language, and longing. She is the recipient of a Banff Centre Residency, the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Medal, the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, and The Fiddlehead’s Poetry Prize. Her writing appears in Best Canadian Poetry, The Literary Review of Canada, Passages North, and elsewhere. She believes art contains the possibility of healing. Instagram: @monibrar

Zaynab Bobi’s Sixteen Songs of Loss was also selected for publication.

The entire Sundress team would like to thank Rita Mookerjee for serving as this year’s judge.

A photo of this year's judge, Rita Mookerjee.

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. In 2020, she was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of False Offering, forthcoming from JackLeg Press (Fall 2023). Her poems can be found in The Baltimore Review, New Orleans Review, The Offing, Poet Lore, and Vassar Review. She edits poetry at Split Lip Magazine and Honey Literary.

We would also like to thank everyone who sent in their work. Finalists and semi-finalists include: 


Finalists

Torey Akers’ Good-Time Girl
Madeleine Bazil, Snake Season
Zaynab Bobi, Sixteen Songs of Loss*
Michael Colbert, Are Bisexual Men Real: Case Studies
Devaki Devay, IT ISN’T IN MY HEAD BUT IT IS IN A FIELD
Griffin Epstein, i don’t believe in sex
Javeria Hasnain, Sin Poems
Crystal Ignatowski, Rabbit Hole
Bryan Okwesili, PRAYER AT THE FEET OF A HOMOPHOBE WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER
Sara Puotinen, Mood Rings
Fiona Stanton, The Voluptuary
Rachel Trousdale, A Long List of Small Mercies
Ellen Welcker, WHICH THE HORSE

Semi-finalists

Owólabi Aboyade, Lee, Young Lee
Sage Agee, Manifesting Boyhood
Colleen Alles, Alewives Returning
Jazmine Aluma, RAW TO THE TOUCH
Susan Barry-Schulz, Prednisone Season
Noah Benham, a night journey into day
Ashley Bunn, living amends
Finnian Burnett, Red Shirts Sometimes Survive
Kristen DeBeasi, A Hallelujah Escaping
Chiara Di Lello, Tender
Cat Dixon, Daring to Stay Adrift
Sheila Dong, The Monsterchild Primer
Emily Duffy, Miradouros
Kristin Emanual, Rescuing Chimera
Gabriela Frank, midday:abyssal
Jade Gaynor, GOD & MEN & THE MOON & SUCH
Lynn Gilbert, My Ear is a Magnet for Music
Cat Green, Just Stay Alive
Dina Greenberg, Prayers for the Lost and for the Living
Sarah Herrin, Your Body Is A Crime Scene
Emily Kiernan, Fissions
Meg Kuyatt, Obsolete Hill
Charlotte McManus, Long Fingers
Casey Moore, Sturdy
Sodïq Oyèkànmí, a theatre of wounds
Max Pasakorn, On Mothers, Drag Queens and Gold
Michelle Petty-Grue, Blue Velvet Couch
Heather Pulido, Good Damage
Laura Ring, Last Seen Leaving
Shei Sanchez, Ruminations of a Nomad
Mervyn Seivwright, Chasing Cherry Blossoms
Alex Shapiro, The Chamber of Commerce 
Ashley Steineger, In the End Only This
Para Vadhahong, From Star to Island
Laura Vazquez, Downtown Puerto Rico
Natasha Wolkwitz, Mess Choir
Kenton Yee, The Octopus of Happiness

* Selected for publications