The Spring 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition
Results are here!
We’re thrilled to announce this spring’s BRCC winner–
Horsemouth and Aquariumhead by Elizabeth Horner Turner
Elizabeth Horner Turner’s debut poetry chapbook, The Tales of Flaxie Char, was published through dancing girl press in 2017. Her work has been published widely in journals such as Cutbank, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, Lost Balloon, and trampset, and it has also been selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50 and Long List. She’s been awarded scholarships to Tin House Workshop and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She earned a BA from Hamilton College, an MFA From Sarah Lawrence College, and now lives in San Francisco with her family.
Congratulations, Elizabeth! We’re so excited to welcome you to the Black Lawrence Press family! Elizabeth Horner Turner’s winning prose collection will be published in the fall of 2024.
Our judges have also selected one Runner-Up and one Honorable Mention in this year’s Spring BRCC. Emma Sloan’s poetry collection, Opheliac, was named a Runner-Up and will be published in fall 2024, and Scott Frey’s prose collection, Night Nurses, was named an Honorable Mention and will be published in Spring 2025. Congratulations to both Emma and Scott! We were, as always, thrilled by the many amazing collections we received and are excited to share these fabulous chapbooks with you!
Emma Sloan is a poet, short fiction author, and journalist with works published across 300+ international digital and print publications—including, but not limited to, The Writer Magazine, The Vancouver Island Poetry Collective, Her Umbrella Magazine, Alopecia UK, and LandLocked Literary Journal. She is the author of “Foxglove” (Chapter House, 2022). As a Writing and Publishing graduate of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, Emma works as a professional copywriter and content writer in a multitude of industries. Her creative writing orbits around the intersection between modern mythology and grief.
Scott Frey grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy. He also serves as a parent advisor for the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Hospital, Boston. He learned to teach and found his first writing communities at The Landmark School in Prides Crossing, MA, and The Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT. In addition to Black Lawrence Press, he has work forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the 2023 Perkoff Prize for poetry. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.
See the full list of the Spring 2023 finalists and semifinalists here, and thank you again to all who entered and to our panel of judges!