2026 SHP Chapbook Contest Results

The editors of Slapering Hol Press are proud to announce Sean Mclain Brown's Shrapnel: A Dictionary of Damages as the winner of the 2026 Chapbook Contest. Here is a complete list of honorees from this year's contest, with a poem from each manuscript.

Winner

Shrapnel: A Dictionary of Damages

Sean Mclain Brown

[photo credit: Prophoto]

Sean Mclain Brown is a combat disabled Marine Corps veteran and member of Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans Writing Group. His writing is shaped by the lasting consequences of war. He is the recipient of the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize, with poetry and fiction appearing in San Francisco Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Terrain.org, and Indiana Review, as well as in the anthologies Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (Koa Books, ed. Maxine Hong Kingston), An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), and Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Press).

First Snow

War has a shadow that lingers, like weather, like today, the cold crowded peaks and ferocious grasses in confusion. A profusion of frost and flowers searching, searching, their hearts fibrillating like a sparrow in a cat’s maw, and the earth, skin like granite, flecked by knots of new growth, stubborn, twisted grasses who whisper wicked, sinful things to the wind under the cataract clouds, carrying slender pearl flakes with wings. The old alfalfa stalks ripple tensely; they can hardly contain their sorrow. Our bombardments have come. There is no loneliness as joyful as an open field of alfalfa below mountains and heavy clouds before destruction; the beautiful uncut hair of graves of those creatures great and small whose names no one will ever remember. Now, gray concrete and electric light skate hand in hand, where in the distance in a dim barn, a father and son hurry the horses into their stalls as we begin our bombing run. Snow drifts from the winter sky that’s pale as milk. Our steel birds, in perfect formation, empty themselves in deafening resonance, cluster bombs fall into the place that is open and smooths the rough edges until everything and everyone is blind and mute.

"First Snow" first appeared in Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Press), and on Terrain.org.

___

Runner-up 

Skin

by Gina Sipley

Gina Sipley, PhD is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Medal for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. A poet and essayist, she is the author of Just Here For the Comments (Bristol University Press) and writes the newsletter Words at https://www.ginasipley.com/. Sipley is a first generation college graduate.

Birth of a Mermaid 

It was the last time we would ever go to the Westbury drive-in.They were leveling it for a twelve screen theater with stadium seating.

We sat in our brown frown of a station wagon, the plastic seats crackling

silver wires poking their way to the surface, scratching

the bottoms of my thighs. 

I cried because my legs hurt.

My mother rolled my black sweatpants up past my knee. 

Little white flakes of skin snowed onto the pea green carpeting.

The scaling had begun and this was the last time

I would ever see and feel my own softness. 

A year later

tar spread across the Westbury field, hardening into thick clumps. 

They began to build the first monster theater. This was the end.

Each little neighborhood theater closed, reborn a Megalasorous.

My own body begins to dry and deteriorate, Ichthyosis devouring

each fresh space of skin, year by year, the scales hardening 

into brown tiles paved in imperfect patterns across my torso

legs and arms and ears and breasts and toes and fingers

suffocating my skin. I, too, was reborn: a mermaid. 

"Birth of a Mermaid" first appeared in The Sierra Nevada Review.

____

Finalist

Flood

by Brian Whalen

Brian Phillip Whalen’s debut collection, Semiotic Love [Stories], was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews. Brian's work has appeared in The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Pinch, Poets.org, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.

Honey

My friend raises honeybees in his backyard, a horizontal hive that bears a ghostly likeness to a child’s coffin. My father, when he was eight years old, was nearly blinded by ground bees on his uncle’s farm, in Illinois. A city boy, his pleasures were the rolling fields, tilting barns, and long black snakes coiled in the trees that bordered his uncle’s pastures. One day he caught his foot in a hole and got swarmed, swallowed by a mad vibration, and if not for his uncle’s coming, his long strides and labor- leathered arms, my father could have died. He survived—but his eyes swelled shut for days. [I recall the time my mother caught a milk snake on the rusty tong of a hoe she’d been wielding to weed her hostas; my father, fearless, took the snake across the road to widow Olsen’s fields.] Nothing stops my apiarist friend, risking pain for the sake of honey— like nothing stopped my father when I climbed the red forbidden pick- up truck behind the shed. In dead sprint my father flew past my mother and sister, who stood frozen, flat-footed, as I got stung, and stung, and stung again. I recall, in my narrowing ken, my father’s figure looming larger the closer he drew to me, until with brazen, blind love, he threw himself into the swarm. 

"Honey" first appeared in Fugue.

_____

FINALIST

To Kiss a Ghost

by Marty Saunders

Marty Saunders is from Pittsburgh. The recipient of a grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the Shipsey Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets University Prize, his work appears in Passages North, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He serves on the editorial staff of Raleigh Review.

Boarding an Overnight Bus — La Paz, Bolivia

City of the full moon & speckled dove, of breathlessness,

thin air spiked with smog & the clay-colored fingers

of La Cordillera Real cutting a serrated skyline

behind grey buildings. City of black-haired women,

stout cholas sharpening their eyes beneath the curled brim of a bowler

hat tipped to one side, their shoulders swimming in shawls, 

hips wobbling the hem of a bell skirt. Open-air markets

where chilies spill from burlap sacks wrapped around the vendors

like colors in a palette running from rust to buttercup.

Where crates are piled with yucca & plantains

& potatoes divided over tarps into mountains

of purple, blue & black stones. City of Singhani

& Oracle’s Alley, of peddlers pushing loose cigarettes

in each square, it’s time. There is the ragged beat

of rebuilt diesel engines, brakes creak & the big, boxed bodies

of the buses lurch backwards when the driver

cuts the engine. With no ticket home & pinches of sand

from Atlantic settled to the bottoms of your pockets,

you’re alone as you’ll ever be, traveler. Watching

the buses nose into their stalls, their windshields holding the names

of cities you’ve never heard of — Antofagasta, Tucumán,

Cuiabá. People stream past with their scuffed duffle bags

& backpacks, the seams of their jeans are whiskered,

the heels of their shoes worn low. After all the miles

where do we go? The asphalt’s a night sky brimming 

with dark whole moons & imploded stars, & we step

over constellations of stomped gum & crushed cigarette butts.

We climb up through the bus’s folded doors

& pass our tickets to the driver. And along his hands,

the broad veins cross briefly, like highways,

before breaking off in different directions.

“Boarding an Overnight Bus — La Paz, Bolivia" first appeared in Poets.org.

_____