cow creek chapbook prize
the 2024 contest is coming soon!
The Cow Creek Chapbook Prize is a poetry chapbook contest brought to you by Pittsburg State University. We're open to all styles and subjects. As long as the poems challenge and capture the imagination, we want to see them.
Our next contest will run from February 15, 2024 until May 15, 2024.
The winning poet will receive $1,000 and 25 author copies. The chapbook will be published as a perfect bound book and sold both online and in limited bookstores.
The winner will be announced in October of 2024.
order a copy of the 2022 winner: sydney vogl's CRYBABY!
“‘i could have one lover in each arm and still hunger from all three of my hearts.’ Thus reads, in its entirety, one of the brilliantly succinct, single-line self-portrait poems in this collection so full of arms and hungers and yes, hearts. Hearts in love, hearts questioning gender, hearts hitting rock bottom only to rediscover some secret warmth. CRYBABY! embraces emotion like sunflowers spilling from a gorgeous pocket dimension where vulnerability shines hard, sings harder. I so love these poems’ ‘unrotten strawberries’ and ‘veins on . . . mother’s hands,’ these scents and textures of delight, intimacy, heartbreak. What a sweaty supernova of aliveness, what an unabashed sob of a gift, this poetry.”
—CHEN CHEN, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
“Exploring the intricacies of gender, desire, and the divided self, Sydney Vogl is a knock-out poet, part love-sick troubadour, part Walt Whitman’s cosmic twin. No matter what she describes—a vodka-soaked sweater, a triple-hearted octopus—the world comes alive under her yearning gaze. CRYBABY! is a dazzling collection.”
—BRUCE SNIDER, author of Fruit and Paradise, Indiana
Sydney Vogl is the winner of the 2021 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project. They are the author of the chapbook CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL and have poems appearing in Iron Horse Literary Review, Tusculum Review, Honey Literary, Booth, and more. She currently lives, writes and teaches in San Francisco.
directors:
Chase Dearinger
Peter Vertacnik
editorial staff:
Chloe Hanson
Taylor Johnson
Spencer Young
Winniebell Xinyu Zong
questions? contact us:
We subscribe to the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Contest Code of Ethics. Guidelines and issues of conflict of interest can be found above. Part of that code is making our process transparent to the public. All chapbooks are initially read by the editorial staff. Exceptional chapbooks then go to a second round of readers, who narrow potential winners down to a limited number of finalists, which are sent to the guest judge for selection.