Contest & Open Reading Period Results

The 2022 Open Mss Call

Prize: Publication

Selections:

MJ Gomez / Love Letters from a Burning Planet
Todd Dillard / Ragnarok at the Father Daughter Dance
Ian Powell-Palm / Waiting on Marie 
Sneha Subramanian Kanta / Every Elegy Is A Love Poem
Ben Kline / It Was Never Supposed to Be
Robin Rahija / Inside Out Egg
Jessica Ram / Earthly Gods

The 2021 Variant Lit Microchap Contest

Judged by Lannie Stabile

Prize: $150 & Publication

Winner: Noreen Ocampo / Not Flowers

Editors’ Pick: Gaia Rajan / Elsewhere

Finalists: 

CD Eskilson / My Roommate Buffalo Bill

RaJon Staunton / Treading Moonlight

Lisa Alletson / Good Mother Lizard

Ashley Cline / Still Smaller Suns

Beth Gordon / God Was Waiting in the River of Lava

The 2021 Open Mss Call

Prize: Publication

Selections:

Deirdre Danklin / How to Start a Coven
Ernest Ògúnyẹmí / A Pocket of Genesis
Lannie Stabile / When the Forest Finds You 
Ashley Cline / electric infinities
Michael Abraham / A New York Love Letter & other little essays
Lukas Hall / space neon neon space
Kiyanna Hill / A Damned House and Us In It
Joshua Bernstein / Glass Essays

The 2020 Variant Lit Chapbook Contest

Judged by Ross White

Prize: $250 & Publication

Winner: Jason B. Crawford / Summertime Fine

Editors’ Pick: Sharon Kennedy-Nolle / Black Wick: Selected Elegies

Finalists: 

Alice Wickenden / To Fall Fable

Iris Litt Dangerous / Territory poems on aging

Mark MacAllister / The Field

Ray Ball / Lararium

The 2020 Open Mss Call

Prize: Publication

Selections:

Danielle Rose / The History of Mountains

Taylor Byas / Bloodwarm

Beth Gordon / The Water Cycle

Kevin Risner / Do Us a Favor

Carroll Susco / Bean Spiller

Gail DiMaggio / Ironwork

Cori Lohstroh / Living Monstes/Damaged Ghosts

Longlist:

Michael Giddings / Caricatures

Brendan Walsh / coffee jokes

Elizabeth Bluth / Learning to Reconcile with the Enemy I Have Come to Think of as My Body

Mathew Serback / Set Fire to Everything You Love

Barbara Alfaro / Catbird

John Leonard / Hunting Season: Poems

Emily Banks / Our Last Luxury

Deirdre Danklin / How To Start A Coven

Stephen St. Francis / Decky Make the Bear Be Nice

Lindsey Schaffer / City of Contradiction

Ea Anderson / I Want to be This Girl

Robert Detman / Building The Perfect Wings

Frank William Finney / Cobwebs in the Cadillac and Other Poems

Rajendra Shepherd / Moonlight Summer

Alex Adams / Ratcatcher

Peter Stavros / (Mostly) True Tales from Birchwood Village

Shannon Wolf / An Installation of What I Left Behind

Joe Baumann / Orbit and Other Places I’d Rather Be

Richard-Yves Sitoski / Essential Tremor

    Jacqueline Bédard / Human, Too

Sarah Kersey / Anacrusis

Preston Smith / Beneath Honeysuckle Rum

Paula Harris / pussybroken

Lannie Stabile / On Pennsylvania Road

Shannon Frost Greenstein / The American Versailles

© Variant Literature Inc 2021