Chapbooks
The life and work of Jeanne Leiby (1967-2011) are remembered in our prose/graphic narrative chapbook series. As editor of The Florida Review (2004-2007), Leiby breathed new life into the magazine. Leiby brought comics to TFR, launched the journal’s first website, published the 30th anniversary issue, and established the coursework and internship program that teaches editorial skills to UCF students. Leiby left The Florida Review to become the first female editor of The Southern Review at Louisiana State University before her death in 2011. She is remembered for her boundless energy, fierce intellect, and love of literature.
To purchase any of our chapbooks, please click the appropriate link(s) below. To submit to the contest, please see our Leiby Chapbook Contest page.
2023 Chapbook Winner
CB Anderson’s Blue Lion Days is our twelfth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
With depth and tenderness, CB Anderson brings us Grand Falls, a mill town claiming a place in the 21st century. So too are its inhabitants: a woodworker raising twin daughters on his own; a recovering addict reconciling God, love, and sobriety; a young woman running the refurbished mill as she sidesteps her father’s grip. There are, meanwhile, the foothills and the river, which is cleaner than it’s been in a century. A kaleidoscopic collection that limns longing, regret, and reinvention, Blue Lion Days is keenly alive.
CB Anderson’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, North American Review, Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, and others. The New Yorker included her book Home Now (2019) in “Briefly Noted,” and a fiction collection River Talk was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014. Awards include the 2022 Winning Writers Tom Howard fiction prize, the Crazyhorse Prize, and second place in the Zoetrope: All-Story fiction competition. Anderson leads workshops around the U.S. and has taught at Boston University and the University of Tampa. She loves ocean swimming, scotch, and karaoke—generally in that order. Visit her at cbanderson.net.
2022 Chapbook Winner
Melanie Bishop’s Home for Wayward Girls is our eleventh annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
“In this beautiful, at times heartbreaking fiction, a family opens their home, already brimming with four daughters and a son, to a girl on the run and a girl in a bad marriage. The young, wise narrator learns about life from the older girls around her—girls who want, but don’t get what they’re after, girls who don’t realize what they deserve. A captivating, tender story that shows how some people rush into our lives as quickly as they rush out, leaving us to wait for the next thing to happen.”
–Jill Talbot, author of A Distant Town
Melanie Bishop is Faculty Emeritus at Prescott College in Arizona, where for twenty-two years she taught creative writing, and was Founding Editor, and Fiction/Nonfiction Editor of Alligator Juniper, a national literary magazine, three-time winner of the AWP Directors’ Prize. Her young adult novel, My So-Called Ruined Life (2014) was a top-five finalist for both the John Gardner Award in fiction and nonfiction in The New York Times, Glimmer Train, The Georgetown Review, The Greensboro Review, The Florida Review, Vela, Essay Daily, Next Avenue, Huffington Post, New York Journal of Books, and others. Currently, Bishop teaches occasional classes for Stanford Continuing Studies, and offers instruction, guidance and editing through her business, Lexi Services. “Home for Wayward Girls” is the title story of her next short story cycle.
2021 Chapbook Winner
Jill Talbot’s A Distant Town is our tenth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
“The stories in A Distant Town stayed with me long after I finished reading them. They felt like familiar songs that break your heart by reminding you of the lonely world they exist in, not unlike Crystal Gayle or Johnny Cash playing on the radio as one drives over miles of open highway in a western state. I felt like I’d known the author long before I read their work, as though we’d been patrons of the same Christmas-light-decorated roadside bar for years and tipped our glasses to each other even though we weren’t formally introduced. The motif of music and jukeboxes was fitting for this collection, because when the last words evaporated into my mind, I was eager to fish some quarters out of my pocket and hit play again.”
–Coyote Shook, author of Coyote the Beautiful.
Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus and has been recognized four times in The Best American Essays. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
2020 Chapbook Winner
Coyote Shook’s Coyote the Beautiful is our ninth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
“This visually inventive and emotionally compelling graphic memoir recounts the experiences of a queer writer navigating a fatphobic society and the slights both outright and subtle that have accumulated throughout their life, including gastric bypass surgery and its complications. Interwoven with references to Tallulah Bankhead, Emily Dickinson, My Fair Lady, and other cultural touchstones, this memoir indicts a society that demands conformity to beauty standards at any cost. Coyote the narrator is cultured, funny, defiant—someone who is a delight to spend time with.”
–Lynne Nugent, author of Nest
Coyote Shook is a cartoonist and PhD student in American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, where they research intersections between environmental history and disability in the Florida Everglades. Their work has been featured in Ransom Center Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, The Puritan, Wisconsin Review, The Society For Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Influenza Project, the National Humanities Center Digital Library, and the North Carolina Folklore Journal.
2019 Chapbook Winner
Lynne Nugent’s Nest is our eighth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
Nest collects flash essays that embrace fragmentary and incomplete thoughts that can result from motherhood—and the demands of contemporary life. Nest emerges from the moments in which technology, feminism, creativity, and ambition all intersect with the eternal needs and rhythms of family life.
Lynne Nugent has been managing editor of The Iowa Review since 2003. Her personal essays have appeared in the North American Review, Brevity, The New York Times, Full Grown People, Mutha Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City.
2018 Chapbook Winner
Michael Chin’s Autopsy and Everything After is our seventh annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
Autopsy and Everything After collects stories of the seedy underworld of professional wrestling and the dreams and hopes of those that inhabit it. Final contest judge Juan Martinez noted, “There is so much pathos and beauty and good humor in these pieces. I loved spending time with these people, how they surprised me, how much I learned about the itinerant wrestling world and how that world contains all of ours—our dead fathers, our lost exes, our fears and hopes.”
Michael Chin is an alumnus of the Oregon State University MFA program. He has previously published two hybrid chapbooks, Distance Traveled with Bent Window Books and The Leo Burke Finish with Gimmick Press, and is a contributing editor for Moss.
2017 Chapbook Winner
Rita Ciresi’s Second Wife is our sixth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
The winner of the sixth annual Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award is Rita Ciresi for her trenchant collection of flash fiction, Second Wife. The housewives that populate Second Wife are estranged from themselves and others. They mourn lost children, plot revenge against their former husbands, lust after the bag boy at the grocery store, seek marital advice from a psychic, and regret the emptiness of an affair. In this collection of linked flash fiction, Flannery O’Connor Award-winning author Rita Ciresi offers a peek into the private thoughts of ordinary women with cutting precision. As noted by this year’s final judge, Robert Venditti, “Second Wife is bursting with wit, tragedy, humor, and heart. Rita Ciresi’s collection of short and flash fiction brings together over twenty stories of loss, longing, and love, each one echoing with a voice as powerful and true as the emotions it speaks of.”
Rita Ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, andRemind Me Again Why I Married You, and two award-winning story collections, Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket. She is professor of English at the University of South Florida, a faculty mentor for the Bay Path University MFA program in creative nonfiction, and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.
2016 Chapbook Winner
Alison Townsend’s The Persistence of Rivers is our fifth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
Alison Townsend is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, The Blue Dress: Poems and Prose Poems and Persephone in America, and two other chapbooks, And Still the Music and What the Body Knows. Her poetry and essays appear in Chatauqua, Feminist Studies, Paraboloa, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition Prize, “notable” mentions in Best American Essays, as well as a Wisconsin Arts Board fellowship. An award-winning teacher, she is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
2015 Chapbook Winner
Nat Akin’s Reno is our fourth annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
Nat Akin’s short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ecotone, and Tampa Review. He is a prior recipient of one of two annual fellowships awarded for Literary Arts by the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.
2014 Chapbook Winner
Marylee Mcdonald’s The Rug Bazaar is our third annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
The Rug Bazaar is a duet of stories, both of which concern American women traveling in Turkey. Both are love stories, and both seem to fly in the face of everything you’d think a love story could be. These are independent stories, yet, as a pair, they harmonize. In music, we might call this “call and response,” how one instrument follows another, and, in following, comments on the first. I’ll leave it to the reader to pick the order in which these two pieces might best be read. But, surely, read them both! Much of the beauty of The Rug Bazaar is to be found in the way each story complements the other.
2013 Chapbook Winner
Polly Buckingham’s A Year of Silence is our second annual chapbook, purchasable here from our store.
In A Year of Silence, a man who has lost his wife to a terrorist attack in the London Tube tries to take care of his daughter, a gifted seven-year-old pianist, who gradually loses her ability to feel the keys of her instrument, to play the music her mother loved or, after surgery, to use her hands for even the most simple task. Stranded in a cottage with no electricity and little food in an unrelenting winter flood rising from the North Sea, the two characters survive the cold wind- and rain-swept Outer Hebrides, an almost perfect embodiment of a depthless and unending grief.
2012 Chapbook Winner
The first annual chapbook—Rubia, by Patricia Grace King—now available for $12. SOLD OUT!
“Rubia is so deftly and subtly written and so smart about so many topics–soccer, travel, youth, language, race, culture, love, and the sexes–that to read it is to feel secretly wise about the world.”