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