It’s a very exciting week for us at Black Lawrence Press, and we could not be happier to share our big news with you! We’ve selected the winners of both our 2025 St. Lawrence Book Award and our Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition. And the winning manuscripts are…
2025 St. Lawrence Book Award: Diasporous by Grace H. Zhou
Grace H. Zhou is a poet, anthropologist, and educator. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, The Margins, Ninth Letter, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Soil Called a Country, was selected for Newfound’s 2023 Emerging Poets Series. She teaches at the University of Edinburgh.
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Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition: Witness Protection by Romana Iorga
Romana Iorga is the author of the poetry collection Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a chapbook entitled a woman made entirely of air (dancing girl press, 2025). She is also the author of two books of poetry in her native Romanian, Auz simplu / Simple Hearing (Semne Press, 2000) and Poemul sosirii / Poem of Arrival (Glasul Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in The Nation, Lake Effect, New England Review, Salamander, RHINO, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and children in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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We are thrilled to add these two amazing books to our list, both of which we will publish in 2027. We’re so happy to welcome both Grace and Romana to Black Lawrence Press!
Finally, here’s a sneak peek at poems from both collections:
From Diasporous by Grace H. Zhou
Shapeshifter : : Sadhbh
I am full with child for the first time
when I realise I am not
in the body of a woman.
Sniffing the woods for fat hazel-buds,
shoots of wild garlic catch my tongue.
All I want is to feast
on spring’s tender greens.
I was human once. I remember
the blood of a gutted thing,
how the glow of fire
did not frighten me.
Or maybe I was a grey wolf
lapping marbled foam from a liquorice stream,
tasting, in my thirst,
kindreds everywhere.
There are stories about women disguised
in the pelt of seals—
or are they seals in hides
of women, longing
for home?
After all, every cell in every body
is being remade.
We are only a refuse
of atoms
from the horsecrabs and meteors and beech-roots.
I have been made and unmade by hands
I asked to touch me, hands I didn’t.
Bestial, I birth a live thing into the matted grass—
how fluidly I leap from the hunters,
as if no skin could contain me.
*
Into the Chrysalis
Between the drought years, before the summers
roiling with smoke, after we marched
in the streets, and before we did it again
and again, broken-hearted, angry,
we drove desert-ward, south.
I still wanted to believe
in the imagination
but violence was everywhere.
Blasted hillsides, oil derricks thrusting
into the earth, indifferent;
villages being razed beneath underpasses,
no one batting an eye.
Somewhere east of Bakersfield,
we pulled off-road, threw up a tent,
night-clear air and fine sand
filtering in as we slept.
Morning and the canyon was streaked
rust-red and blood-red.
Around us, a desert
in maddening bloom.
That’s when I saw them, one at first,
clinging to the stalk of a coreopsis.
Then another, and another, I noticed
until I couldn’t unsee the invasion.
Hairy and hell-bent,
these little caterpillars
clustered on the apricot mallows, dangling
from the Mojave aster’s brief beauty.
Hungry, ugly things they were,
did they know how short
this life of theirs? Did they feel
nothing but their brutal drive?
Which of them could guess
at what came after
the entombment,
the insides-out, gut-melting
darkness, a dissolution
that could only feel like death?
*
From Witness Protection by Romana Iorga
Witness Protection
with a first line by Mary Ruefle
From this day forward all plants
will allow me to rename them.
All will receive brand-new passports
and fictional lives. If caught and interrogated,
they will lie through their teeth
and refuse to cooperate. They will wither,
uproot themselves, splinter and burn
before they give me away.
When tortured and put to death,
even kudzu will be hailed as a hero.
Its children will scurry across the earth
like a leafy, life-giving pestilence.
Shaggy, the trees will grow at odd angles.
Unruly. Untamed. Spy on humans
and infrastructure. Smother the highways.
Picture this. In their wake, oxygen
fills our lungs to utmost capacity. Fills
our brains, our hearts. Hospitals become
obsolete. Airports, inaccessible. Also,
unnecessary, as the 100% oxygenated brain
has endowed us with the power to fly.
War belongs to the dark 21st century,
when all life teetered for one
agonizing political mandate on the brink
of extinction. Money is a curious thing
of the past. Factories and power plants
go green or fall into ruin. Many
are turned into art galleries. Museums.
Restaurants. Performance spaces.
My verdant godchildren wield
their edenic power: joyful, exuberant,
endlessly self-replicating. All of this
because of what language can do.
Meantime, I grow old and forget
their names, their complicated stories.
I only remember the green of their faces,
the rustle of many-fingered hands.
Each night, they tap on my window
and whisper. You are the mother of all
vegetables, they say. You are the fruit.
*
Per Aspera ad Astra,
neighs the hobbled mare of my mind
and leaps into the sky. I get it. We’re fed up
with our diet of nettles, no matter how
fortifying. We shuffle through the house
like Archimboldo’s grotesques,
barely holding in our prickly spinach.
Thistles sprout all over the floor
when we stop to think. This morning, pain
is a blue streak. An angel in disguise
with a shovel. Shoveling. So much peace
has fallen overnight, the city is
unrecognizable ecstasy. On our street
alone, several trucks belonging to god
are wholly entombed in white petals.
Silken mercy! We forget to be grateful,
my hankering mare and I. We should
wishfully plant some gratitude in a lesser
future nightmare. For now, we’re in debt
to sweet pain. Look how it makes us see
what’s not really there. Like the thirty
camouflaged angels in our driveway.
Some lie on their backs, as good
angels should, making truthful copies
of themselves for whomever is watching.
We’re watching, all right? Others
have chosen to bury their ordinary halos
in the trees. See them ravish that poor
dogwood with their massive wings?
A disgrace. Someone should call
the heaven police. What do you think
is our least acknowledged regret, I ask
the only mare I have. The blank canvas,
she answers. Full of potential, like hunger.
*
What It Means to Look Back
When it comes in the night,
I am hardly myself. I am two parts
water, one part solitude.
Dangerously close to lonely.
It’s the moon’s fault.
Look how it illuminates
the rickety shelves of my life.
How it makes them seem
empty. What are you tonight, moon?
A longing? A wounded toy?
A city in flames?
Tell me, what am I?
A pillar of salt missing its former
body? A child overcome
by a desire to cry? A scorched
shadow cast by a bird
flying so close to you, it almost exists?