Many congratulations to Amelia Martens who won the Spring, 2010 Black River Chapbook Competition with her manuscript Purgatory.
Amelia Martens was born in Puyallup, WA nine minutes after her twin sister and nine days before Mt. St. Helens erupted. She grew up in Ventura CA, graduated from UC Santa Barbara, and went to work as a greensman and set dresser on feature films. In 2007 she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. At work on her first collection of poems, she has taught writing as an adjunct instructor at West Kentucky Community & Technical College since 2007. A co-founder of the Rivertown Reading Series, she was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discover”/Boston Review poetry competition. She also received an Emerging Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council in 2010. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in such journals as Cold Mountain Review, Connecticut Review, Epicenter, Kudzu, pacificREVIEW, Slipstream, The Madison Review, and Whiskey Island. She is married to the poet Britton Shurley; they are awaiting the arrival of their first child and have a ridiculous dog named Hoosier.
Congratulations also go to those who made the long list and short list for this competition.