2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award Winner!

THE OBOE IS A DUCK, by Elizabeth Erbeznik

The Florida Review is thrilled to announce our winner for the 2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award, Elizabeth Erbeznik! Her chapbook The Oboe Is a Duck will be published and available for purchase in late 2026.

“The Oboe Is a Duck is filled with stories of recollection. From the flash piece ‘Between Water and Sky,’ in which a young woman looks back on the summer when her mother abandoned her and her brother, to the title story, in which the narrator excavates the stark corners of the neighborhood of her youth, the settings here are just as haunted as they are haunting. In particular, these stories are snapshots of a long-lost Northern California. In works like ‘Queen Failure’ and the gorgeous ‘Bone Garden,’ relationships and bonds that  were once forged in the Golden State are now as brittle as ash, worthless as the pyrite that once fooled the territory’s prospectors, and the reader learns to cherish what they have because of the loss depicted here. But above all, the short stories in this chapbook are rich veins of memory: mined, smelted, tempered, and gloriously remade.”

– Contest Judge Barrett Bowlin, author of Ghosts Caught on Film

Elizabeth Erbeznik is a writer and educator with a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Best Small Fictions, Anacapa Review, Catamaran Literary, Los Angeles Review, Terrain.org, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Northern California, she lives with her family in Austin, TX. Her website is elizabetherbeznik.com

Barrett Bowlin is the author of the short fiction collection Ghosts Caught on Film (Bridge Eight Press, 2022). His stories and essays appear (or are forthcoming) in The Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Waxwing, Salt Hill, Hobart, Hotel Amerika, The Saturday Evening Post, Barrelhouse, and Bayou. He’s interviewed authors for sites like The Rumpus, Fiction Writers Review, The Normal School, and Memorious. He teaches Composition, Literature, & Creative Writing at Suffolk University.