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.
Francine Conley (What Sweetness from Salt) is a writer and performing artist. She has a chapbook, How Dumb the Stars (Parallel Press). After a good decade of performing multimedia solo shows as well as touring collective productions with a Franco-American theater troupe, Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte, she earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson in 2014. Since graduating her poems and reviews have been published in places like: American Literary Review, The Collagist, Green Mountains Review, Fogged Clarity, Juked, Pink Panther Magazine, The New England Review, Sky Island Journal, Tinderbox, and more. For more on her arts: 
Rebecca A. Durham (Half-Life of Empathy) is a poet, botanist, and artist. Originally from New England, she now calls Montana home. She holds a B.A. in Biology from Colby College, a M.S. in Botany from Oregon State University, and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Montana. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Rebecca’s writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Superstition Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Riverfeet Press Anthology: Awake in the World, Mud Season Review, Meniscus, Epiphany Magazine, Pacific Review, Mantis, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, Poetry Northwest, and is forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review and Exposition Review. You may find more of her work at 
Eva Heisler (Lexicon of Old Devotions) is a Maryland-born poet and art historian. Her poems have been widely published in journals, including BOMB, Crazyhorse, RHINO. Poetry Northwest, and Tupelo Quarterly. She has published two books of poems: Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press) and Drawing Water (Noctuary Press). Honors include a Fulbright grant to Iceland, the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award, and fellowships at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.
Amir Hussain (Still Life) is a multidisciplinary poet and scholar, whose poems have appeared in many journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Faultline, Mizna, andWater~Stone Review. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. He is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Emory University, where he is working on a project on comparative poetics.
Megan Leonard‘s (Book of Lullabies) poetry can be found most recently in Sharkpack Annual, Outlook Springs, Transom, and Reservoir. Her digital chapbook, where the body ends, is available through Platypus Press. Megan lives and works on New Hampshire’s seacoast.
Nathan Manley (De Horae, The Extant Fragments) is a writer and teacher living in Loveland, Colorado. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Northern Colorado, and his first chapbook, Numina Loci, was published in the spring of 2018 by Mighty Rogue Press. His poems have appeared (and are forthcoming) in literary journals both online and in print, includingThink, About Place Journal, Flint Hills Review, and others. His has also been nominated for inclusion in Best of the Net.
Bino A. Realuyo (The Rebel Sonnets) is the author of The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, which won a 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA’s Resistance Issue, New Letters, Manoa: International Journal of Pacific Writing, Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Literary Review. A graduate of Harvard University, he lives in New York City and works as an adult educator and immigrant rights activist. His website: 
Susan Sonde (Evenins at the Table of an Intoxicant) is an award-winning poet and short story writer. Her debut collection: In the Longboats with Others won the Capricorn Book Award and was published by New Rivers Press. The Arsonist, her fifth collection will be released May 2019 from Main Street Rag. Grants and awards include, a National Endowment Award in poetry; grants in fiction and poetry from The Maryland State Arts Council; The Gordon Barber Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Her collection The Chalk Line was a finalist in The National Poetry Series. Individual poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The North American Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Mississippi Review, American Letters and Commentary, Bomb, New Letters, Southern Poetry Review, and many others.
JD Trejo-Maya (Desert Sands) was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he spent his childhood in the small neighboring rural pueblo of Tarimoró and where from he immigrated in 1988. His inspirations include Netzahualcoyotl, Humberto Ak’abal, Ray A. Young Bear, and James Welch. Published in various literary journals/sites in the UK, US, Spain, India, Australia, Argentina, and Germany. Pushcart Prize nominee in 2015 and was awarded Tercer Premio from El Centro Canario Estudios Caribeños – El Atlántico – en el Certamen Internacional de Poesía “La calle que tú me das” 2016. While in ceremony with Chololo medicine men in the Tule River Reservation he dreamt the above written prophecy…
Farah Ali (People Want to Live) is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her more recent work can be found in Copper Nickel, The Arkansas International, Kenyon Review Online and Ecotone. She received a special mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prizes for a story published in the J Journal, and was the winner of the Colorado Review’s 2016 Nelligan Prize. She also won Copper Nickel’s Editors’ Prize in Prose for the fall 2018 issue. She can be reached via www.farah-ali.com.
Kari Nielsen Amlie (Koloniya) is originally from Montana and received a BA in English from Middlebury College. Before starting an MFA program at the University of Wyoming, she worked as a guide and wilderness ranger in Montana, Utah, Patagonia, and Alaska. Her work has been anthologized in Waymaking andWanderlust: A Narrative Map and appears in The Esthetic Apostle and CIRQUE.
Robert Long Foreman‘s (Deep Feeling) short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize, and his first novel, WEIRD PIG, won the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. His first book, AMONG OTHER THINGS, an essay collection, was published in early 2017 by Pleiades Press. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Agni, Barrelhouse, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City.
Jessica Hollander’s (Resurrection Without Wings) previous short story collection In These Times the Home is a Tired Place won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, published by the University of North Texas Press. Her stories have appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Sonora Review, Cimarron Review, Bat City Review, Hotel Amerika, and more. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama and is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Kearney.
Miah Jeffra (The Violence Almanac) is author of the essay collections The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic Press 2017) and The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (forthcoming Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). Awards include the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and finalist for the Prairie Schooner, Robert C Jones and St. Lawrence Book Prizes. Residencies include Ragdale and The Hub City Writers Project. Recent publications include The North American Review, Fourteen Hills Review, The Atticus Review, The Nervous Breakdown and Fifth Wednesday. Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Beaudelaine Pierre (You May Have the Suitcase Now) is Haitian born and raised and now lives in Minnesota with her two children, Annie and Max. Her debut novel Testaman won First Prize in the 2002 Best Creole-Language Novel Contest sponsored by the newspaper Bon Nouvel in Port-Au-Prince. Pierre is an alum of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her most recent novel, L’enfant qui voulait devenir President is published by Les Editions Harmattan. In 2012, she co-edited with Natasa Durovicova, How to Write an Earthquake, a trilingual anthology in English, French, and Creole, that constitutes a collective response from Haitian writers across the globe to the catastrophe Haiti suffered on January 12, 2010. Pierre is currently a doctoral candidate in the Gender Women and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Minnesota.
Christina Quintana (CQ) (A Slip of Moon) is a New York-based writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. She is the author of SCISSORING (Dramatists Play Service, 2019) and the chapbook of poetry, THE HEART WANTS (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry and prose has appeared in Saw Palm, Nimrod Journal, Foglifter, and OnCuba, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Playwrights Realm, Van Lier New Voices at the Lark, and Lambda Literary, and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. For more, visit 
Karin Spirn (The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God) is a writer, community college instructor and martial artist living in Oakland, California. She holds a Phd in English from the University of Michigan and has published work in Bust and Hip Mamamagazines. Her writing and illustrations can be found at 
Sonja Swift (Echo Loba) writes to explore the contours of place as land, home, language, memory and identity. Her work has appeared most recently in Barren Magazine, FIRE & RAIN: Ecopoetry of California, a publication of Scarlet Tanager Press, Catamaran Literary Reader, Virga Magazine, Kestrel: A Journal of Art and Literature, Alphabet Atlas, a chapbook of prose poems published by Deconstructed Artichoke Press, and Tarot of Transformation, a long form creative nonfiction published by True Story, a publication of Creative Nonfiction. She recently completed an MFA at California College of the Arts. Together with her husband and son, she calls home both the Bay Area, California, and the Black Hills, South Dakota.
Philippine-born and LA-raised, Elsa Valmidiano (We are No Longer Babaylan) is a writer and poet who calls Oakland home. For several years, Elsa was a women’s reproductive rights activist, and incorporates much of that former activism into her writing. Her works have appeared in various literary journals such as TAYO, make/shift, As/Us, Literature for Life, Anti-Heroin Chic, Mud Season Review, Yes Poetry, Northridge Review, Memoir Magazine, and Cosmonauts Avenue, as well as various anthologies such as Field of Mirrors, Walang Hiya, Circe’s Lament, Precipice, and forthcoming in What God Is Honored Here. Elsa is an alum of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and Summer Literary Seminars that was hosted in Tbilisi. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and has performed numerous readings. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. She blogs regularly at 
David Fuks lives and writes in Portland, Oregon, where he also works as an actor. The son of Holocaust survivors, he received degrees in both English Literature and Social Work from the University of Michigan. As a writer of both humorous and poignant stories, 
“Curses” by Kathleene Donahoo
Ramona DeFelice Long writes short fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and personal essays about women, fa
Nektaria Petrou’s work has appeared in 
Darci Schummer is the author of the story collec
Through twenty years of writing I’ve often let my teaching work gobble up my time. I’m changing that now, finishing a memoir and a novel. I found out my story was a finalist on the first of five days I’d devoted to my writing, and I’m certain this gift came because I turned toward my writing in this way, my “attagirl” from the universe. I’m grateful and honored and delighted it is New Rivers Press.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Aoki (Coder Girl Takes Over) has received grants from the City of Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation, and a Hedgebrook residency. Her poetry publications include the chapbook, Every Vanish Leaves Its Trace by Finishing Line Press, and The Seattle Times, Nassau Review, Carbon Culture Review, Enizagam, Phoebe, Poetry East, Hunger Mountain, Nimrod, and Poetry Northwest. (Photo Credit: JLD Imagery)
in the Middle East and West Africa, where they teach English literature to high school students and travel often throughout the regions. Tara holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and her poems have been published or recently accepted by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts; One; Salamander; The Southampton Review; War, Literature and the Arts; and other literary magazines.
Karina Borowicz (Touch Stone) is the author of two poetry collections, Proof (Codhill Press, 2014) and The Bees Are Waiting (Marick Press, 2012), which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry and was named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, and have been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series and on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Trained as an historian, Borowicz also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Hampshire. She makes her home in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts. Visit her website at karinaborowicz.com.
Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Incarnate, was a semifinalist for the 2017 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, and an earlier version of the same manuscript was the finalist for the 2011 Perugia Press Prize. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. She works as a doula, childbirth educator, and homeschool teacher in Nashville, where she lives with her husband and their four children.
Hannah Dow (Rosarium) is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, where she has served as an Associate Editor for Mississippi Review. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, and The Journal, among others. She has received finalist nods and honorable mentions from the AWP Intro Journals Project, the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize, and the American Literary Review annual contest.
journals, including Painted Bride Quarterly, Epiphany, Ilanot Review, Lunch Ticket, The Meadow, Ash and Bones, Switchback, Poetica, subprimal and Hawai’i Pacific Review. He was a 2008-2009 Loft Literary Center (MN) mentee, and a 2011 grantee of the MN State Art Board. His novella Searching was serialized in 33 issues of The Alley News. He is the editor of The Phoenix of Phillips, a new literary magazine for and by people of Phillips, the most diverse neighborhood in Minneapolis. He and his wife Luisa pastor a bilingual church in Minneapolis.
Greg Nicholl ((there) a town) lives in Baltimore and works in publishing. His poetry has most recently appeared in The Cortland Reivew, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, Nimrod, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.
forthcoming from Scablands Books. Her poems have been nominated for Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize, and have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Laurel Review, Bellingham Review, the Collagist, Mid-American Review, Redivider, Southern Indiana Review, Duende and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Eastern Washington University and the recipient of a grant from the Spokane Arts Fund.
Sheila Squillante (Mostly Human) is the author of the poetry collection, Beautiful Nerve (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), and three chapbooks of poetry: In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens, 2014), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line, 2012) and A Woman Traces the Shoreline (Dancing Girl, 2011). She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page (Sense Publishers, 2015). Recent work has appeared or will appear in places like Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, North Dakota Quarterly, Waxwing, Menacing Hedge and River Teeth. She teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University, where she edits The Fourth River, a journal of nature and place-based writing. From her couch in front of wonderful bad television, she edits the blog for Barrelhouse.
Nightingale. Her first, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Women’s Poetry Prize. Her seventh chapbook, Near the Arctic Circle, is forthcoming from Tiger’s Eye Press. Since receiving an MFA degree in Creative Writing in 2004, she has been teaching creative writing, environmental literature and composition at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. Previously, she spent nearly eight years working in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai-Cambodian border. She is a PhD candidate (creative writing/poetry) at Lancaster University.
Mariano Zaro’s (Under the Wrong Light) poems have been included in the anthologies Monster Verse (Penguin Random House), Wide Awake (Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA), The Coiled Serpent (Tía Chucha Press, San Fernando, CA), Angle of Reflection (Arctos Press, CA) and in several magazines in Spain, Mexico and the United States: Luces y Sombras (Tafalla, Spain), La Peste (México D.F.), LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), Askew (Ventura, CA), Diálogo (DePaul University, Chicago), Zócalo Public Square (Arizona State University), Tupelo Quarterly (Finalist of the Tupelo Quarterly Inaugural Poetry Contest, Tupelo Press) and The New Guard Vol. V (Finalist). Since 2010 he conducts a series of video interviews with prominent American poets as part of the literary project Poetry.LA. (www.Poetry.LA). Mariano Zaro earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Granada (Spain) and a Master’s in Literature from the University of Zaragoza (Spain). He teaches Spanish for Heritage speakers at Rio Hondo College (Whittier, California).