Maine Chapbook Series Winner

The Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance is pleased to announce that National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez has chosen Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories as the winner of the 2020 Maine Chapbook Series. Dudley will receive a $500 award, and his manuscript will be published in 2021. Nunez also named Cassandra Power’s Leave Yourself Alone as the runner up.

Nearly sixty manuscripts were submitted for the chapbook series contest this year, and two award-winning Maine fiction writers named eight manuscripts as finalists, including work by Elizabeth Iverson, Russell Dame, Rachele Ryan, Erica Dubois, Brett Willis, and Jennifer Dupree, in addition to Dudley and Powers.

Brandon Dudley is a graduate of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, where he was managing editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. His short fiction has won a Maine Literary Award and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His stories, essays, interviews and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in New South, The Millions, The Forge, Fiction Writers Review, and others. A former journalist, he now teaches high school English in Brunswick, Maine, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

The Maine Chapbook Series began in 1983 as an initiative of the Maine Arts Commission. Then-assistant director and current Maine State Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum led the project, and it became a collaboration between MAC and MWPA that ran for over a decade, publishing one chapbook each year by an emerging poet or writer. Past judges included Philip Booth, Amy Clampitt, Donald Hall, David Huddle, Mary Oliver, and Charles Simic. For an example of the series’ impact, one need look no further than the 1991 competition: that year, poet Betsy Sholl won with her collection Pick a Card and the late poet Donald Hall served as the judge. Sholl went on to serve as Maine State Poet Laureate, and Hall served as the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006.

The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance brought back the Maine Chapbook Series in 2019. Each three-year cycle, the contest rotates between poetry (2019), fiction (2020), and nonfiction (2021), and MWPA will publish and promote that year’s winning manuscript. Each year, MWPA will involve a distinguished author from outside Maine who will select the winning manuscript and write a brief introduction. Each year, the emerging writer selected to have their chapbook published will receive $500 and 25 copies of the book. An image by a Maine artist will be selected for the cover, and the artist will receive a $500 prize.