The 2021 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest — Winner and Finalists!
Congratulations to Abby Johnson, winner of the 2021 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest, selected by Kazim Ali, and a sincere thanks to everyone who submitted. Thank you, also, for your patience while we reviewed all the extraordinary work this year. We’ll be publishing Johnson’s winning chapbook next spring. Congrats as well to all of these fabulous finalists and longlisters. You’ll see these books alive in the world sooner than later.
WINNER // $2000 + Publication in 2022
Selected by Kazim Ali
Opportunity Cost by Abby Johnson
“Opportunity Cost is a skillfully built sequence about grappling with the aftermath of assault. Ordinarily innocuous parts of language, like punctuation and the act of editing ones words, become powerful tools with which the poet explores the torturous ways we negotiate pain caused by those close to us. It is a unique book on an often difficult to navigate topic. I am grateful for it, grateful to the poet who crafted it.”
—Kazim Ali, Guest Judge
Abby Johnson is a poet and a Hoosier who is proud of the local art scene that fostered her. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing through Butler University. She is Poetry Co-Editor for Booth: A Journal. Her micro-chapbook No Line Except is published through Ghost City Press in their Summer 2019 collection ( https://ghostcitypress.com/2019-summer-microchap-series-1/no-line-except ). She has individual pieces published in Turnpike Magazine, Josephine Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, and most recently in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of Sycamore Review.
Honorable Mentions from Kazim Ali:
Will Russo, Dreamsoak
Ari Gtz Scz, Weather Tomorrow
Finalists:
K.D. Harryman, Alprazoland
Matthew Gellman, Night Logic
Caroline Chavatel, Issuance
Shawn Hoo, Of the Florids
Andre Hoilette, Cothilda, a flamewoman
Jeff Whitney, Thirteen Stories
Simon Shieh, Every Scar is an Eye
