After announcing the finalists for the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest at the beginning of the month, the students in our Practicum in Publishing course have been hard at work reading, deliberating, and deciding on the winners for the contest. We’re sure you’ve all been waiting with baited breath as much as we have. We’re excited to share what the students have decided. Here’s what they had to say:
We’re happy to announce the winners of the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest! Congratulations are in order for Kathryn Kulpa and Sophia Liu. Kathryn Kulpa wrote “Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted and Other Stories”, a unique collection of prose that bends the lines between genres, creating a fun and interesting selection. Sophia Liu wrote “There is No Happy Ending”, a fascinating selection of poetry that explores Chinese culture and diaspora, femininity, and oppression. Thank you as well to the other finalists and everyone who submitted!
Practicum in Publishing students
Over the rest of the fall semester, the students will be editing, laying out, and designing covers for the two manuscripts. Watch our social media for updates along the way, and watch out for the completed books in the spring of 2023!
Congrats again to Sophia and Kathryn!
Kathryn Kulpa (Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted) has words in Ellipsis, Five South, Flash Frog, Milk Candy Review, Monkeybicycle, No Contact, Pithead Chapel, and Wigleaf. She is the author of a story collection, Pleasant Drugs (Midlist Press) a micro-chapbook, Who’s the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project), and a flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus), winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest. Her stories have been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist. She is a flash editor at Cleaver magazine.
Sophia Liu (There is No Happy Ending) is an American poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Muzzle Magazine, DIALOGIST, Superstition Review, Storm Cellar, Underblong, and elsewhere.
The editors at New Rivers Press are excited to announce the finalists for the New Rivers Press Chapbook competition! From here, the manuscripts will be handed to the students in our Practicum in Publishing class at Minnesota State University Moorhead to make the final decision. Stay tuned for the announcement of the winner(s) at the end of the month!
La Bamba by Ryan Rivas
Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted by Kathryn Kulpa
The Divine in You by Reshmi Hebbar
fields drawn from subtle arrows by Ceridwen Hall
Instar by Erika Kielsgard
There is No Happy Ending by Sophia Liu
Tiny Creatures by Eliezra Schaffzin
a woman made entirely of air by Romana Iorga
Ceridwen Hall (fields drawn from subtle arrows) is a poet and book coach from Ohio. She holds a PhD from the University of Utah and is the author of two chapbooks: Automotive (Finishing Line Press) and Excursions (Train Wreck Press). Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals. You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com.
Reshmi Hebbar (The Divine in You) (@reshmijhebbar) has written more stories about Pallavi and her friends that have been published or are forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Ponder Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, The Chaffin Journal, and several others and are part of a longer, linked collection currently seeking representation. She is an emerging writer and professor of multicultural literature at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta who has published essays on ethnicity and identity at Slate and Khabar Magazine. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga (a woman made entirely of air) is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including the New England Review, Salamander, The Nation, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.
Erika Kielsgard (Instar) is an adjunct lecturer and horticulture student in Brooklyn, NY. She is a writer, singer, and artist researching disruptive patterns for protective concealment in nature. Most recently, their work is in Footprints: an anthology of new ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), and has found generous homes in Bone Bouquet, Cordella Magazine, Maudlin House, The Penn Review, Volume, and others. Erika has readings recorded with The Brooklyn Rail, Futurepoem, and SAND, as well as an animated interview on Life Touching Life that premiered at SLSA (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) in 2021. She holds a BA in psychology from George Mason University and an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College.
Kathryn Kulpa (Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted) has words in Ellipsis, Five South, Flash Frog, Milk Candy Review, Monkeybicycle, No Contact, Pithead Chapel, and Wigleaf. She is the author of a story collection, Pleasant Drugs (Midlist Press) a micro-chapbook, Who’s the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project), and a flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus), winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest. Her stories have been chosen for Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf longlist. She is a flash editor at Cleaver magazine.
Sophia Liu (There is No Happy Ending) is an American poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Muzzle Magazine, DIALOGIST, Superstition Review, Storm Cellar, Underblong, and elsewhere.
Ryan Rivas (La Bamba) is the author of Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus 2022). He is the Publisher of Burrow Press, and the Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program. A Macondo Writers Workshop fellow, his work has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Necessary Fiction, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere. (Photo credit: Ian MacAllen)
Eliezra Schaffzin (Tiny Creatures) is a recipient of the Calvino Prize, awarded for a work of fabulist, experimental fiction. Her work has also been recognized by the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and has appeared in Conjunctions, PANK, the HarperPerennial Anthology Forty Stories, and other publications. Schaffzin lives in New England, where she has taught writing at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She’s currently at work on a novel about two girls in love against a backdrop of college applications, Beethoven’s choral music, religious apocalypticism, and “innovative” aerial drones. eliezraschaffzin.com.
New Rivers Press seeks poetry and prose manuscripts of 20–40 pages in length for consideration for our first chapbook contest. We are interested in flash fiction and nonfiction, prose and lyric poetry, literary and speculative works (sci fi, fantasy, horror, etc.) and innovative works that play around and between all those genres. Manuscripts may be comprised of smaller pieces or one larger work. Individual pieces can be previously published, but the manuscript as a whole must be unpublished in its submitted form.
All submissions will be read blind, so please make sure that your name and contact information only appears within the cover letter and not within the manuscript itself. Finalists will be selected by New Rivers Press editors, and the winner(s) will be selected by publishing students enrolled at Minnesota State University Moorhead.
New Rivers Press is dedicated to finding and supporting new and underrepresented voices. We strongly encourage writers of color, LGBTQIA+ authors, writers from all traditionally underrepresented and marginalized communities, and first-time authors to submit. We’re excited to see things we haven’t seen before. Show us what you got!
Submission Guidelines:
$15 submission fee.
Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please notify NRP immediately of acceptance elsewhere.
Multiple submissions are allowed, provided there is no overlap in content, and each manuscript submitted is accompanied by a $15 fee.
Please include acknowledgements of individual pieces previously published in magazines, anthologies, or elsewhere.
All of the material included in your submission must be of your own composition and free from copyright restrictions. Should you be selected for publication, you will be responsible for securing releases.
Submissions will only be accepted through Submittable. Any submissions sent through the mail will be returned unread, if SASE is included, or recycled, unread.
Authors selected for publication will receive:
250 prize and publication
25 author copies and an author discount on further copies
Submissions will be accepted June 6-August 1 on our Submittable page only.
After months of reading and reading, weeks of deliberating and discussing, we’re incredibly excited to announce the results of the 2019 Many Voices Project competitions!
Congratulations to our winners! We’d also like to thank everyone who submitted. We look forward to sharing these amazing works with you all!
Poetry
Our poetry winner is Samuel Ugbechie with Monologue of Fire.
Samuel Ugbechie is a writer who builds apps and plays basketball. He has works published or forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Palette Poetry, Aurora Poetry, Nottingham Review. He recently won the 2020 Aurora Poetry Winter Contest, and his works have been recognized in awards like the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Frederick Holland Poetry Collection Award, Into the Void Poetry Prize, and others. He tweets @sugbechie.
Prose
Our prose winner is Rosaleen Bertolino with The Paper Demon and Other Stories.
Rosaleen Bertolino’s short stories have most recently appeared in New England Review, Litro, failbetter, and Orca. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she received her MA in English/Creative Writing from SFSU. Now in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she is co-founder and host of Prose Cafe, a monthly reading series, and at work on a novel, among other projects. More information at www.rosaleenbertolino.com
The process of screening manuscripts and selecting a winner for poetry in the Many Voices Project is an annual highlight for the New Rivers Press family. Each year finds us yet again amazed and grateful to receive manuscripts from poets practicing their craft in every corner of the world, and it is with a sense of humility and reverence that we approach our task of winnowing down our submissions to a handful of worthy finalists. After considerable deliberation, we have limited our final list to six manuscripts. As is always the case, we would be proud to publish any of these manuscripts, unfortunately we can only select one winner. Stay tuned for that announcement in the upcoming weeks.
Millicent Borges Accardi (Through a Grainy Landscape), a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of two poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon 2016). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She lives in Topanga, CA.
Sara Biggs Chaney (Hagia Animalia) is a writer and collage artist from Vermont. She teaches writing and serves as the Associate Coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship at Dartmouth College. In addition to two chapbooks, she has previously published poems in Sixth Finch, Blackbird, Rhino, Sugar House Review, Juked, Columbia Poetry Review, Pank, Gargoyle, Thrush, and more.With her co-author, Michael Chaney, she has recently published visual poetry in Redivider, Puerto Del Sol, and New Delta Review, and prose in Spirituality and Health, Games and Puzzles Magazines, Sycamore Review and Hotel Amerika.
Helena Lipstadt(Our Dark and Radiant Land) was born in Berlin and lives in Los Angeles and Blue Hill, Maine. Lipstadt’s poems have been featured in Rattling Wall, Lilith, Bridges, Sinister Wisdom, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Medium and Common Lives, Lesbian Lives. Her writing has also appeared in the following anthologies: The Challenge of Shalom, From Memory to Transformation, and Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers, Lipstadt is the author of two chapbooks, Leave Me Signs and If My Heart Were A Desert. Her prose-poem Do Widzenia won silver in the Travelers Tales’ Solas Awards. Lipstadt has also been a writer-in-residence at the WUJS Institute’s Arad Arts Program in Arad, Israel, and at The Borderland Foundation in Sejny, Poland.
Erin Malone (Site of Disappearance) is the author of Hover (Tebot Bach), and a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make (Concrete Wolf). Recent honors include the Robert Creeley Memorial Prize from Marsh Hawk Press, Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize, and fellowship support from Kimmel-Harding Nelson, The Anderson Center, Ucross, and Jentel. Her poems appear in FIELD, New Ohio Review, Ruminate, and Cimarron Review, among others. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2016 to 2020, she teaches poetry in Seattle. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @erinmalonepoet.
Samuel Ugbechie (Monologue of Fire) is a writer who builds apps and plays basketball. He has works published or forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Palette Poetry, Aurora Poetry, Nottingham Review. He recently won the 2020 Aurora Poetry Winter Contest, and his works have been recognized in awards like the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Frederick Holland Poetry Collection Award, Into the Void Poetry Prize, and others. He tweets @sugbechie.
Shannon K. Winston (The Girl Who Talked to Paintings) holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. She has previously published Threads Give Way (Cold Press Publishing 2010). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Crab Creek Review, The Citron Review, The Los Angeles Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. She currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she teaches in the Princeton Writing Program. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/
