Poetry Chapbook Contest

*Please note that submission fees allow us to offer a $200 prize, pay $100 to a judge, and also offset the cost of publishing and promoting the winning collection. As a non-profit literary publishing house, we understand that submission fees can be difficult to accommodate. Please know that 100% of your fee will go toward supporting the publication of an excellent poetry chapbook or nonfiction book and to supporting Choeofpleirn Press’ mission to bring the best literature possible into the world. Some manuscripts that do not win the contest are still eligible for publication by Choeofpleirn Press.

Choeofpleirn Press is proud to announce that Christine Andersen’s chapbook, To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone is the winner of the 2025 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, hereafter to be known simply as the Choeofpleirn Press Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Here is what the judge had to say about Andersen’s book:

To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone is a chapbook-length elegy to a young woman who committed suicide by hanging herself. While these poems contain specific details, the poems often end with resonant images and metaphors, allowing the “words [to]…hit the floor screaming” before the poet, in visiting the hill where this woman's ashes were scattered, believes that "the earth/ had swallowed my folly,/ entombed my grief." These poems move from grief to bewilderment before repeating these steps. Ultimately, the poet reaches a kind of recognition in that the desire to kill ourselves may sometimes exist, and it takes “feel[ing] the noose/ tied taut against the neck…to be absolutely sure that we/ would never jump.”

Below is the list of the finalist and semi-finalists for the contest:

Finalist: Jani Pearson’s “Nothing Left to Fix”

Semifinalists:

“I Remember” by Dick Epstein

“The Lonely Vocation” by Taliesin Gore

“The Pull of Fleeting Moments” by Tim Gray

“What Makes Us Purple” by Michael Hill

The judge had this to say about the finalist chapbook:

Nothing Left to Fix records the difficulty of seeing a loved but aging parent go through a slow decline. Using images taken from the natural world and while employing several different poetic forms, these poems express the hope that a family member has for that “bluest mirage” and “the few pinpricks of light” even though the air itself remains “untranslatable.” These poems take us on a conveyor through the halls and rooms in hospitals while the person left behind “struggle[s] against forward motion.”