Chapbook Prize

Oversound Chapbook Prize (NOW CLOSED)

Judge: Brandon Shimoda

$1000 and 25 copies to winner.

$18 to enter. All entrants will receive a subscription to Oversound.

April 1, 2020-May 31, 2020

Manuscript length: 15-30 pages. For a manuscript outside this range, please contact us prior to sending.

About the Judge: Brandon Shimoda is a yonsei poet and writer. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award, The Desert (The Song Cave), and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His writings on Japanese American incarceration have appeared in The Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub, The Nation, and The New Inquiry. He lives in the desert.

A note from the Oversound editors regarding the 2020 contest.

francine j. harris was originally announced as the judge for the 2020 contest. Our screening process was significantly slowed down because of the pandemic, and unfortunately, we missed the window in which she was available to read the finalists and choose a winner for the contest. We weren’t able to meet the timetable we agreed to with her prior to the pandemic. Together with francine, we decided the best solution was for us to find a new judge. Brandon Shimoda agreed to be our new judge. All participants should’ve received an email from us in September regarding this switch, and anyone who did not should contact us at oversoundpoetry@gmail.com if they have questions or concerns.

Guidelines:

Please do not include any identifying information on your manuscript.

No acknowledgments.

Manuscripts must be previously unpublished. (Individual poems may have been published.)

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable.

Multiple submissions to this contest are acceptable, but each submission requires an entry fee.

Past or present close friends or students of the judge or the editors are not eligible to enter.

Please do not submit revisions to your manuscript once it has been entered in the contest. Revisions are acceptable prior to publication.

No citizenship requirements or limitations. Entrants living outside the United States may be asked to pay a higher fee to account for postage (if they wish to receive the magazine).

Translations are not eligible.

Electronic submissions only. Make sure to choose Chapbook Contest under Genre in the submission manager. Payment for your submission should be made via PayPal after you submit the manuscript. The submission manager will send you to a page that contains the PayPal link, but if you run into trouble contact us at oversoundpoetry (AT) gmail (DOT) com.

***

2019 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Silvina López Medin

Mary Jo Bang has chosen Silvina López Medin’s Excursion as the winner of the 2019 competition. Thanks again to everyone who entered the contest for sending us your work and supporting the magazine.

Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and currently lives in New York. She is the author of three books of poetry: La noche de los bueyes (Madrid, 1999), which won the International Young Poetry Prize by the Loewe Foundation, Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar (Buenos Aires, 2014), and 62 brazadas (Buenos Aires, 2015). Her play, Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo, 2008) was granted the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (2015) and Home Movies (2016), a selection of poems by Robert Hass, into Spanish. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Excursion will be the first collection of her works to be published in English.

***

2018 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner: Kanika Agrawal.

Solmaz Sharif has chosen Kanika Agrawal’s Okazaki Fragments as the winner of the 2018 competition.

Kanika Agrawal is a hybrid specimen raised in six countries on four continents. She studied biology at MIT, where she came to love restriction enzymes and fluorescent labeling. She received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, SAND, and various SF&F publications.