We’re so excited to let you know that the results for the Spring 2018 Black River Chapbook Competition are in. And the winning manuscript is …
This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album by Alan Chazaro
Alan Chazaro is a high school teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, the former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and a June Jordan Poetry for the People alum at UC Berkeley. His poems have been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Puerto del Sol, Huizache, and Iron Horse Review. He is most proud about his sneaker collection and being selected for an AWP Intro Journals Award by 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Tyehimba Jess. His first chapbook is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press as a winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. He is currently wearing Pumas.
We’re also thrilled to announce that we will additionally be publishing Blood Box by Zefyr Lisowski, which was a finalist in the Spring 2018 competition.
Zefyr Lisowski also goes by Zef and is a queer poet, artist, and Southern transplant currently based in New York. She teaches and studies at Hunter College, edits poetry for Apogee Journal, and is also author of the microchapbook Wolf Inventory (Ghost City Press, 2018). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Muzzle, DIAGRAM, Bone Bouquet, and The Texas Review, among other journals. She’s a Pushcart nominee and 2018 summer resident at Sundress Academy of the Arts. Find her at zeflisowski.com.
We couldn’t be happier to add these two amazing chapbooks to our series. This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album and Blood Box will both be published by Black Lawrence Press in fall 2019. We’re so happy to welcome both Alan and Zefyr to the BLP family!
Our finalists and semi-finalists were:
FINALISTS (alphabetical)
Bayna Bayna: In-Between by Zeina Azzam (poetry)
Ecology by Derek Berry (poetry)
This Is Not A Frank Ocean Cover Album by Alan Chazaro (poetry)
Whole Histories of Space by Liana Jahan Imam (fiction)
A Music of Ribs by Liz Kellebrew (fiction)
The Path the Lost Girls Take by Kathryn Kulpa (fiction)
Blood Box by Zefyr Lisowski (poetry)
The World at the End of the Garden by Gillian Walker (fiction)
SEMI-FINALISTS (alphabetical)
Child Witch by Hussain Ahmed (poetry)
Is It Enough to Have Feathers? by L.A. Alden (poetry)
Breach by Stacey Balkun (poetry)
Midwest Mix: Boskeydell Bombs by Bryce Berkowitz (poetry)
Some Places Worth Leaving by Dani Burlison (fiction)
Other Women by Rita Ciresi (fiction)
Dear Fox Dear Barn by Ben Clark and GennaRose Nethercott (poetry)
It’s As If You Don’t Love Me Anymore by Judith Cooper (fiction)
Frontier by Clinton Craig (fiction)
Organizing the Rain by Rebecca Doverspike (poetry)
Hijito by Carlos Gomez (poetry)
The Drum, Like the Heart, Keeps Faulty Time by Sian Griffiths (fiction)
I Am Not What I Set out to Be by Chelsea Harris (fiction)
Oh The Days by Sue Mell (fiction)
When I Think of Firmament by Nicholas Molbert (poetry)
Marge and Maybelline by William Polf (fiction)
It’s Not You :: It’s Everything by Hannah Rego (poetry)
Body, This by Lois Roma-Deeley (poetry)
We Did this to Ourselves by Pete Stevens (fiction)