MAYDAY POETRY CONTEST
Micro-Chapbook Contest
Chapbooks will be published here in Spring 2025
The Flea is a lyrical and critical meditation, using the flea as a parasite and marketplace to morph into a monstrous, grieving artifact. We enter an intimate yet exhilarating site for examining consumption and digital accumulation, where Vietnamese histories and diasporic fugitivity interweave with the detritus of late capitalism. There is a precise and permeable language here: ‘crouched in the machine of want…/ fleeing the multiplication of spaces for loss.’”
– Angela Peñaredondo
JUDGE: Angela Peñaredondo
FIRST PLACE WINNER: The Flea by Jessica Q. Stark
JESSICA Q. STARK is s the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), winner of a Florida Book Award and a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020), and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). Her work appears in The Nation, Best American Poetry, Pleiades, The Florida Review, among other publications. She is a Poetry Editor for AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series in Jacksonville, Florida.
SECOND PLACE: Our Sodden Bond by Kelly Gray
“I feel held in its currents of tenderness and terror— in Our Sodden Bond‘s folkloric and fabulist reconstruction of girlhood as both wounding and weapon, makes it possible for childhood trauma to alchemize into a mythological resurrection. ‘Some deaths were folded up like origami and passed back and forth / like a blunt.’ Gendered violence and CSA, though devastating realities, Our Sodden Bond manifests narratives with a spiritual pulse from survival and play as liberation.”
RUNNER UP: Sleepwalking by Maura Modeya
“In Sleepwalking, the voice operates in a register of intimate defiance in the liminal space, confrontational yet matter-of-fact. Being back in a time of heightened state control and institutional power, I am compelled by its confrontational tone and queer erotic autonomy as a political declaration against the machinations of power.”
Finalists:
Motherless Mothers and the Daughters They Bear by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
“Persephone Watches a Star Is Born” by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
“SEX-MEX” by Emiliano Gomez
“Eleven Lessons” by Charles Malone
“Rome Days” by Anne Pedone
“Dream Dog” by Carrie Tebeau
MAYDAY FICTION CONTEST
Theme: “Stories that save us”
A visceral and mesmerizing character study, told in poetic and luminous prose. Here is a story that snatches your attention until the last eloquent line.”– Lindsay Wong
JUDGE: Lindsay Wong
LINDSAY WONG is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune and a debut collection of short fiction, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality, which was shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Follow her on X/Twitter @LindsayMWong, Instagram @Lindsaywong.M, or visit www.lindsaywongwriter.com.
FIRST PLACE WINNER: “Portrait of Uncle in Boxers” by Aaron Barreras
A
ARON BARRERAS is an unlikely writer who started life as a small-town boy from New Mexico and somehow stumbled into an award winning career in film, animation and VFX. After making pixels all day, writing is a chance to escape the screen, which he stares at far too often, and to make words instead, which he doesn’t do often enough. He’s no longer a boy, but still lives in a small town.
SECOND PLACE: “Mile High Chicago” by Patrick Nicodemus Miller.
PATRICK NICODEMUS MILLER is a writer, educator, and graduate student at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. For years he taught 8th grade in Mission, South Dakota and is currently working as a ski instructor at Gunstock, just off Lake Winnipesaukee. He spends most of his time thinking about craft, The Baltimore Orioles, and his retired cattle dog, Huey.
RUNNER UP: “Mirrors” by Sunshine Barbito
SUNSHINE BARBITO is a fiction writer, living in Long Beach, California. Her short stories have appeared in several literary magazines, including “Sleepover” in Fecund Magazine and “Jump for Heart” in Prometheus Dreaming. As an editor, Sunshine worked on many acclaimed series, including The Umbrella Academy Volume 3: Hotel Oblivion, We’ll Soon Be Home Again, and Fight Club 3. To Sunshine, fiction is everything.
Finalists:
“Dad Jokes” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler
“Abatement” by Max Wheeler
“Chapter Zero” by Patricia Feinman
“Just the Way I Like it” by Alan Sincic
“Timing” by Sam Zabell
MAYDAY NONFICTION CONTEST
Creative Nonfiction Theme: “Hope is action.”
“We were struck by the singular voice and experience of the narrator, the gripping narrative, and its intimate look into how belief in conspiracy theories can not only rip apart a country, but a relationship between mother and daughter, and how the narrator worries that will impact her own mothering.”– MAYDAY nonfiction editors
JUDGE: The nonfiction editors of MAYDAY
FIRST PLACE WINNER: “The Mirror Operator” by Sarah Mullens
SARAH MULLENS is a Hammond-Schwartz Fellow at Colorado State University and associate editor at the Colorado Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Missouri Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. A sixth-generation West Virginian, she lives between Putnam County and Colorado’s Front Range.
SECOND PLACE: “The Retirement Clipboard” by Ed McManis
“The narrative style and quick pace (manifested through the bullet point structure) adds up to an insightful, poignant assessment of a life and reflection on education and the roles of students and teachers.”
RUNNER UP: “Life, Death Neighbors, Houses” by Mary Allen
“This piece draws parallels between a neighbor’s house and body — and that of the narrator’s own — for a compelling meditation on the ways in which our communities can be both known and unknown to us.”
