cow creek chapbook prize
the 2023 contest is open!
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.
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 2023.
this year's judge is
chad abushanab
![CA Author Photo [90].jpeg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/78b9df_a8f46e78f183412b891e5fece809f7a6~mv2.jpeg/v1/fill/w_167,h_167,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/CA%20Author%20Photo%20%5B90%5D.jpeg)
order a copy of the 2022 winner,
sydney vogl's CRYBABY!
Chad is the author of The Last Visit, which won the 2018 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Sewanee Review, Ecotone, The Believer, Best New Poets, Southern Poetry Review, and many other publications. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Bemidji State University located in the northwoods of Minnesota. www.chadabushanab.com
guidelines:
Submit 15-30 pages of poetry with a $15 entry fee by May 15, 2023.
Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if the chapbook is accepted elsewhere.
Multiple submissions are fine, but each chapbook must be submitted separately.
It’s fine if individual poems have been previously published or if one is accepted over the course of the contest, but the arrangement of poems must be an original work.
Submissions are read blind, so please don’t include your name or other identifying information anywhere on the manuscript.
Past or present students of Pittsburg State University and individuals directly connected to the judge are not eligible to submit.
praise for 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.