Call for Manuscripts
October 1, 2020 – January 5, 2021
The Frost Place, a nonprofit center for poetry and the arts at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, in partnership with Bull City Press, has established a poetry chapbook fellowship. We invite submissions to the Ninth Annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press.
In summer 2021, the winner’s chapbook will be published by Bull City Press, and the winner will receive 10 complimentary copies (from a print run of 300), and a $250.00 stipend. The winner will also receive a full fellowship to attend the five-and-a-half-day Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place in August 2021, including room and board (a cash value of approximately $1,500.00), and will give a featured reading from the chapbook at the Seminar. In addition, the chapbook fellow will have the option to spend one week living and writing in The Frost Place House-Museum in September 2021 (peak leaf season in the White Mountains), at a time agreed upon by the fellow and The Frost Place.
Look for the link to our submission manager, as well as information about summer programs at The Frost Place, on the home page of The Frost Place website: www.frostplace.org.
The 9th Annual Frost Place Chapbook Final Judge will be announced soon.
Submission Period: October 1, 2020 – January 5, 2021.
Application Fee: $28.00.
Applications are only accepted online unless other arrangements are made with The Frost Place office.
Look for the link to our submission manager, as well as information about summer programs at The Frost Place, on the home page of The Frost Place website: www.frostplace.org.
ELIGIBILITY
The 2021 Bull City Chapbook Fellowship at The Frost Place is open to any poet writing in English. Simultaneous submissions are permissible, but entrants are asked to notify the contest administrators through the contest website immediately if a manuscript becomes committed elsewhere.
Please do not submit to this contest if you are close enough to the final judge that his integrity or the integrity of Bull City Press and The Frost Place would be called into question should you be selected as the winner. You may query us if you have questions regarding this matter. Please query by email to submissions@bullcitypress.com.
SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT
Entries must be submitted between October 1, 2020 and January 5, 2021. All entries must be submitted to our online submissions manager. Entries submitted by e-mail, fax, or US mail are not permitted and will be disqualified.
Entries must be accompanied by a $28.00 entry fee. Entrants may submit multiple manuscripts, but must pay a $28.00 entry fee for each manuscript submitted.
Do not include your name on any of the pages of the manuscript file. The first page of the manuscript should include the title of the collection only.
Manuscripts should have a page count (poems only, not including title page, table of contents, acknowledgements, or other items) of 20 to 25 pages.
Manuscripts should be submitted in PDF (.pdf) or Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) format only. Manuscripts submitted in another file format are not permitted and will be disqualified. Manuscript revisions are not permitted during the contest.
The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript.
Submit your manuscript now: https://thefrostplace.submittable.com/submit
OUR READING PROCESS
Each manuscript is delivered to two preliminary readers as a blind submission. That is, it is stripped of identifying material. Only the manuscript, inclusive of any text notes, is sent to the readers and, if chosen as a finalist, then sent on to the final judge. Preliminary readers are asked to notify the press if the work in a submitted manuscript is familiar to them, in which case it will be reassigned as a blind submission to another reader.
Our preliminary readers for the contest are selected by Bull City Press and The Frost Place and are published poets who have received a graduate degree in creative writing or literature. Our readers look for beautifully-crafted work, manuscripts that have a cohesive shape and feel like complete chapbooks. They look to present a wide range of excellent work to the final judge.
In the event that the final judge chooses no manuscript for publication, all contest fees will be returned.
Final notification of the contest winner and contest finalists will be provided by e-mail to all contest entrants by May 2021.
ABOUT THE 2020 JUDGE
Patrick Donnelly, director of The Frost Place Poetry Seminar since 2011, is the author of four books of poems: Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019), Jesus Said (a chapbook from Orison Books, 2017), Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012, a 2013 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press). Donnelly has taught at Smith College, Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his spouse Stephen D. Miller, with whom he translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. Their translations have appeared in many journals, including Circumference, The Harvard Review, Kyoto Journal, Metamorphoses, and Transference. Donnelly and Miller’s translations in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award.
PREVIOUS WINNERS
2020 Winner (selected by Patrick Donnelly)
Armen Davoudian, Swan Song
2020 Editors’ Selections
Afua Ansong, Postcard to Phillis Wheatley
Michael Bazzett, The Temple
2020 Finalists
Ae Hee Lee, Changeling
Susannah Lodge-Rigal, Bare/Bearing/Barely/Bore
Mia Malhotra, Mothersalt, A Lyric
Margaret Reges, Somewhere In The Branches
Ryann Stevenson, Call
Dujie Tahat, Uninvited Guests
2019 Winner (selected by Eduardo C. Corral)
Cassandra J. Bruner, The Wishbone Dress
2019 Editors’ Selection
Tariq Luthun, How the Water Holds Me
2019 Finalists
Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Mama’s Boy
Patrycja Humienik, Origami Mouth
Rachel Inez Marshall, Mariposa
Rachel Mennies, The Teenage Girl Understands
Erin Miller, Eventually, Some Sort of Monster
Meghann Plunkett, Wild and Dangerous
Nomi Stone, Fieldworkers of the Sublime
Angela Torres, What Happens is Neither
2018 Winner (selected by Sandra Lim)
Yuki Tanaka, Séance in Daylight
2018 Editors’ Selection
Jim Whiteside, Writing Your Name on the Glass
2018 Finalists
Kaveh Bassiri, 99 Names of Exile
Charlie Clark, Cocktail Parties in the City of the Dead
Nava EtShalom, Fortunately
Emily Viggiano Saland, Trajectory.
Lena Moses-Schmitt, True Mistakes
Philip Schaefer, What I Love About Myself I Look for in Others
Paul Tran, The Hour I First Believed
David Welch, Wonderful
2017 Winner (selected by Diane Seuss)
Conor Bracken, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour
2017 Editors’ Selection
Leila Chatti, Tunsiya / Amrikiya
2017 Finalists
Charlie Clark, Cocktail Parties in the City of the Dead
Marlin M. Jenkins, Psalms for the Rioting
Amanda Moore, Requeening
Christopher Nelson, Winterseed
Seif-Eldeine Och, Voices of a Forgotten Letter
Samuel Piccone, Pupa
Philip Schaefer, Hymn Gasoline
Mark Taksa, SPEAK Risk
Seema Yasmin, No English
2016 Winner (selected by Afaa Michael Weaver)
Tiana Clark, Equilibrium
2016 Editors’ Selection
Chloe Honum, Then Winter
2016 Finalists
L.A. Johnson, Little Climates
Edgar Kunz, This Close
Caitlin Reid, Almagest
Marc Sheehan, Limits to the Salutary Effects of Upper Midwestern Melancholy
Katrina Vandenberg, Conservatory
2015 Winner (selected by Jennifer Grotz)
Anders Carlson-Wee, Dynamite
2015 Editors’ Selections
Michael Martone, Memoranda
Anna Ross, Figuring
2015 Finalists
Elly Bookman, Recession Dreams
Raven Jackson, little violences
L.A. Johnson, Little Climates
Alessandra Lynch, Wolf & Root
Philip Schaefer, [Hideous] Miraculous
Marc Sheehan, Limits to the Salutary Effects of Upper Midwestern Melancholy
Monica Sok, Year Zero
2014 Winner (selected by David Baker)
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, The Greenhouse
2014 Editors’ Selection
Emilia Phillips, Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike
2014 Finalists
Dan Albergotti, No Freedom
Jeremy Bass, Passenger
Mark Jay Brewin, Jr., El Camino and Other Poems
Kathryn Stripling Byer, The Vishnu Bird
Matt Donovan, Every Last Thing
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., History
Autumn McClintock, No Lore, No Mutiny
Winnona Elson Pasquini, And the Stars from the Sky Are Ripped
Christian Teresi, Like Shining from Shook Foil
Anna Welch, From Bone
Angela Veronica Wong, Elsa
2013 Winner (selected by Patrick Donnelly)
Jill Osier, Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White
2013 Finalists
Liz Ahl, Rendering Eye
Idris Anderson, Elizabeth I
Jeremy Bass, Passenger
Lisa Fay Coutley, Tether
Dante Di Stefano, Dreaming of Orchids
Sarah Gelston, The Oar
Michael Grabell, Macho Man
Leonard Kress, Surplus
Becca J. R. Lachman, Our Barn’s Leper Face
Diane LeBlanc, Sudden Geography
Alicia Rabins, A Book of Manuals
Jose Reyes, Present Values
Sarah Sousa, Split the Crow
Karen Terrey, How to Read Signs
Casey Thayer, Lake the Shape of My Hand
Angela Voras-Hills, Nothing to Undo
Abigail Wender, The Other-Branch
Stefanie Wortman, Valley of Correction