2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition Winner

Yuki TanakaYuki Tanaka

Yuki Tanaka of Austin, TX has won the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition for his manuscript, Séance in Daylight. Tanaka receives a fellowship to the Frost Place Poetry Seminar, a $250.00 prize, and a week to live and write in the Frost Place house in Franconia, NH. Séance in Daylight will be published by Bull City Press in September, 2018. About the manuscript, judge Sandra Lim said:

“Séance in Daylight is about desire, transformation, and dreams; it is also about intricate, yet light-footed sessions with the dead. The ever-present undertow of the poet’s sharp observations keeps these lush, yet lapidary lyrics from slipping into solipsism or sentimentality. ‘Back home, my body thin and healthy / cooling my feet on a crystal ball like a psychic out of business,’ says one speaker, returning from an imagined visitation. These poems remind us that at times, life’s very existence feels unbearably inexplicable, beautiful, perverse, moody, and touching. Yuki Tanaka connects these feelings with a spiritual intensity and a sweet wit. His images startle, ‘A bare white arm / disinfected. Plump, sizzling,’ and they pierce into our inwardness, ‘This pile of wood wished to be a stairway / but couldn’t. Will you pretend to climb it.'”

Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. He is an MFA student at the Michener Center for Writers at he University of Texas-Austin. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His translations of modern Japanese poetry (with Mary Jo Bang) have appeared in New Republic, Paris Review, and A Public Space, among other journals. He is poetry editor of Bat City Review.

2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition Editors’ Selection

Jim WhitesideJim Whiteside

Each year, the editors at Bull City Press select a manuscript from the competition.  This year’s editors’ selection is Writing Your Name on the Glass by Jim Whiteside of Charlotte, NC.

Jim Whiteside is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, and is the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared or will soon appear in journals such as The Southern Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, and Salt Hill, as winner of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he works as a barista in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Congratulations to the 2018 Finalists

Séance in Daylight by Yuki Tanaka
Fortunately by Nava EtShalom
True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt
Wonderful by David Welch
The Hour I First Believed by Paul Tran
99 Names of Exile by Kaveh Bassiri
Writing Your Name on the Glass by Jim Whiteside
Cocktail Parties in the City of the Dead by Charlie Clark
Trajectory. by Emily Viggiano Saland
What I Love About Myself I Look for in Others by Philip Schaefer

See Previous Winners

See previous winners, like Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, Tiana Clark’s Equilibrium, Anders Carlson-Wee’s Dynamite, Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse, and more, in the Bull City Press store.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, all poetry titles (books and e-books) are 15% off with coupon code POETRYMONTH.  Offer ends April 30.