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.