Celebrating the 2026 Chapbook Contest Winner!
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce the winner of our 2026 Chapbook Prize: Exit Interview by Jacqueline Rosado. Rosado is a Florida girl who believes that all poems are love poems.
Exit Interview is an incisive exploration of abortion, femininity, and familial trauma in a powerful voice and bold poetic experiments. We look forward to publishing this volume soon. Congratulations to Rosado!
“We wore masks, and she named us ungrateful. I was sorry
that this was the first time I loved her. She wanted to live
in a dead house with liver for dinner, only speaking in goodbyes.
For years I had wanted the truth. ”
About the Judge
Alafia Nicole Sessions is a black poet, writer, and mother living in Atlanta. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in POETRY, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Ecopoetry Anthology, Southern Humanities Review, Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review, Poetry Daily,and elsewhere. Alafia is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Yaddo, The Watering Hole, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Georgia Writers Association, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She was selected by Evie Shockley as the winner of the 2023 Furious Flower Prize. Alafia was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and thrice nominated for Best New Poets. She also received the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry. Her debut manuscript, Nine Drops of Turpentine, was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize.
