2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize Finalists
The Headlight Review is excited to announce the finalists for the 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize. Out of over seventy total submissions, twenty submissions were selected for the longlist. Of those twenty submissions, the following nine titles were selected:
An Angel and Other Poems by Christina Hauck
Chinaberry Constellations: Odes by Van Garrett
Feminine Morbidity by Maya Williams
On a Saturday in the Anthropocene by Elizabeth Coleman
Our Use of the Stars by Jed Myers
Point of Incision by Jodi Balas
Self-Portrait with LSD & Mirror by M Ezra Zhang
Urchin to My Shell by Kristy Snedden
Waiting Room by Gary Stein
These submissions have been sent to this year’s judge, Olatunde Osinaike. The winner will be announced on Friday, May 16.
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. Selected in 2024 as the Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, he is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books), winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, shortlisted for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry and Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize.
He is also author of the limited-edition chapbooks Speech Therapy (TAR) and The New Knew (Thirty West). Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and Frontier Industry Prize, semifinalist for the Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry.
His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, New Poetry from the Midwest, Obsidian, Wildness, and elsewhere.
