2022 Maine Chapbook Series Winner
Award-winning poet Joshua Bennett has chosen Sasha Goodwin's Centipede as the winner of the Maine Chapbook Series.
Our sincere thanks to the more than 60 people who sent in their excellent work for this contest. Thanks also to our two readers, both former Maine Literary Award winners. We would also like to congratulate the poets whose manuscripts were finalists: Samaa Abdurraqib, Mike Bove, Robert Carr, Michaela Cowgill, Jay Franzel, Tasha Graff, Beth Jones, Judy Kaber, Glenn Morazzini, Jennifer Ryan Onken, and Jonathan Pessant.
Goodwin’s chapbook will be published in the early fall of 2023 with editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press. The MWPA has opened contest to select a cover image by a Maine artist for the chapbook.
At the beginning of the pandemic Sasha Goodwin moved back to Maine after thirty mostly good years in Seattle. She grew up in Pownal and lives in Auburn with two black cats and a young pit mix named Cheddar. In 2017 she completed an MFA in Creative Writing through the Pacific University low-residency program in Oregon.
Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of four books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2021, he received the Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.
The Maine Chapbook Series began in 1983 as an initiative of the Maine Arts Commission. Then-assistant director and former Maine State Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum led the project, and it became a collaboration between MAC and MWPA that ran for over a decade, publishing one chapbook each year by an emerging poet or writer. Past judges included Philip Booth, Amy Clampitt, Donald Hall, David Huddle, Mary Oliver, and Charles Simic. For an example of the series’ impact, one need look no further than the 1991 competition: that year, poet Betsy Sholl won with her collection Pick a Card and the late poet Donald Hall served as the judge. Sholl went on to serve as Maine State Poet Laureate, and Hall served as the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006.
The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance brought back the Maine Chapbook Series in 2019, and poet Martha Collins chose Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone, which appeared in 2020. Fiction writer Sigrid Nunez then chose Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories, which appeared in 2021, and writer Melissa Febos then chose Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit, which appeared in 2022. Each three-year cycle, the contest will continue to rotate between fiction (2023), nonfiction (2024), and poetry (2025) and MWPA will publish and promote that year’s winning manuscript. Each year, MWPA involves a distinguished author from outside Maine who selects the winning manuscript and writes a brief introduction. Each year, the emerging writer selected to have their chapbook published receives a $500 prize and 25 copies of the book. An image by a Maine artist is selected for the cover, and the artist also receives a $500 prize. The Maine Chapbook Series has been made possible by the Maine Arts Commission, the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust, and the Nichols Fund. For more information about these chapbooks, click here.