STEEL TOE BOOKS 2021 CHAPBOOK AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT
Steel Toe Books is excited to announce our Steel Toe Books Chapbook Award selection. The title will receive publication in Fall 2021. Congratulations to our shortlist and longlist authors, and thank you to all of the authors that submitted to the prize.
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FINAL SELECTION
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Soft Animals by Brian Rigg Get a copy HERE!
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About Soft Animals
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Soft Animals is in conversation with the urban, natural, and imaginative landscapes that surround us. This small offering of poems explores sometimes hostile geographies, taking the reader along a journey that is both violent and beautiful. These poems bear witness to past acts of human predation but always looks to a future of catharsis and hope. They are also moments of remembrance and homage to the victims of this violence. Brian Rigg challenges us to question easy assumptions about erasure and agency. He explores these uneasy intersections of joy and pain with the sensitivity and skill of a keen observer of the human and natural world. Soft Animals insists on breaking with that given world and demands that you imagine another.
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About the Author
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Brian Rigg's poems has been recently published in The Hawai'i Review, Genre: Urban Arts: House Vol.2 and A3 Review. His work has been anthologised in Ma'ka: Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writing by Queers of African Descent and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets. He is the author of a previous volume poetry, A False Paradise. (ECW Press, 2001). He has been the recipient of grants from the Toronto Arts Council, The Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He is a proud 2016 LAMBDA Fellow.
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SHORTLIST and LONGLIST
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Again, congratulations to our shortlist and longlist writers, and thank you to all of the writers that submitted to the Steel Toe Books Chapbook Award 2021.
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SHORTLIST
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Birdsong, Birdsang by Tom Paine
Amelia by Katherine Seltzer
Occupy Frogs by Lyndsay Weiner
the water did a good thing by Samantha Adams
In The Language of Crows by Joe Jackson
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LONGLIST
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Gasping for Air by Imani Wallace
House of Hunger by Uzodinma Okehi
Back to the Deepening Well by Kim Lozano
What Forges Us Steel: Judge Judy Poems by Jen Karetnick
A Travel Guide for the Exiled by Zein Al-Amine
cincuenta sonetos by Lori Bedikian
The Last Men on Earth by AE Hines
Music's Poetry by Shelby Stephenson
River of Doubt by Chris Dahl
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