The Peavey invites Maine artists to submit up to five images to be considered for the cover design of the Maine Chapbook Series.
Submissions will be accepted through Feb. 13.
There is no entry fee, and the winning artist will receive a $500 stipend and five copies of the published chapbook.
To read an excerpt from the winning manuscript, “The Rabbit,” by Coco McCracken, as well as to read the full submission guidelines, go to https://bookshop.org/lists/maine-chapbook-series.
The Maine Chapbook Series began in 1983 as an initiative of the Maine Arts Commission. Then-assistant director and former 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, 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, and poet Martha Collins chose Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone, which appeared in 2020. Fiction writer Sigrid Nunez then chose Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories, which appeared in 2021. Each three-year cycle, the contest will continue to rotate between poetry (2022), fiction (2023), and nonfiction (2024), and MWPA will publish and promote that year’s winning manuscript. Each year, MWPA involves a distinguished author from outside Maine who selects the winning manuscript and writes a brief introduction. Each year, the emerging writer selected to have their chapbook published receives a $500 prize and 25 copies of the book. An image by a Maine artist is selected for the cover, and the artist also receives a $500 prize.
Maine artists can submit up to five images to be considered for the cover design of the Maine Chapbook Series. There is no entry fee. In concert with a professional graphic designer and the author, MWPA will make the final decisions on the graphic design of the cover. The image selected as the winner will be credited in the book and be treated with respect by the design. The winning artist will be asked to read the chapbook manuscript (approximately 60 pages) and have a chance to talk with the writer and the MWPA staff about the cover after the selection process.
