Announcing the 2026 Chapbook Contest Longlist
The Headlight Review is happy to announce the longlist for the 2026 Poetry Chapbook Prize. The winner of this year's contest will receive publication, an award of $500, and 25 copies of their book.
Exit Interview by Jacqueline Rosado
Aging in Place by Joyce Schmid
Daughterland by Carlin Katz
Shut-In by Mac Wilder
Lineage by Cortney Daniels
The Glyph and the Wound by Ling Li
A Folding Sky by Michael Kolb
Survival as a Queer Nomad by Stephen House
Anything Wild by Bill Richardson
The Bones We Nurse Inside by Joshua Jacobs
Shout Out of the Sky by Gina Tranisi
The Seasons We Couldn’t Stop Hurting by Chuck Carlise
Designing for Entropy by Megan Rankin
Moon Chapbook by Dylan Foster
String Lights against the Darkness by Danielle Riccardi
The Deepest Song by Michael Theroux
If My Pillow Was a Garden by Anissa Johnson
Rivers of Milk by Christopher Ahrens
Little Gardens All Around by Judith Fox
Inverbate City by Christopher McCormick
Knelt Before Him Yet I Am the Serpent by Sally Stack
Where Were We When We Were Here by Arlo Voorhees
Erratics by Julie Shulman
Agnes by Laurel Szymkowiak
The Losing by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried
Alafia Nicole Sessions
These manuscripts will move forward for review by our guest judge, Alafia Nicole Sessions. Sessions is a black poet, writer, and mother living in Atlanta. She currently works as an educator, actress, herbalist and birthworker. 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.
The winner will be announced in July 2026.