2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winners

For the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize, we received 1,885 entries, and far more wonderful manuscripts than we have space to publish. We’re excited to announced three winners this year. Each poet will receive $5,000, and each of their chapbooks will be distributed to all 8,000 of our subscribers, beginning with the Fall 2020 issue of Rattle. Per the guidelines, at least one of the winners had to be a poet who had never published a full-length book.

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~ Fall 2020 ~

Kathleen McClung

A Juror Must Fold in on Herself
Kathleen McClung
San Francisco, California

Kathleen McClung is the author of Temporary Kin (2020), The Typists Play Monopoly (2018), and Almost the Rowboat (2013). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the winner of the Rita Dove, Morton Marr, Shirley McClure, and Maria W. Faust national poetry prizes. McClung serves as sponsor-judge of the sonnet category of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition and as a reviewer for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries. She teaches writing and literature classes at Skyline College and The Writing Salon. In 2018-19 she was a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. (web)

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~ Winter 2020 ~

Tom C. Hunley

Adjusting to the Lights
Tom C. Hunley
Bowling Green, Kentucky

In a 30+ year publishing career, Tom C. Hunley has placed poems in journals beginning with every letter of the alphabet except for Y. The most recent of his six full-length collections is Here Lies (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018). Forthcoming from C&R Press in March 2021 is What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems. He has also written two textbooks and co-edited a third. He is a professor in the MFA/BA Creative Writing programs at Western Kentucky University, where he has worked since 2003.

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~ Spring 2021 ~

Jesse Bertron

A Plumber’s Guide to Light
Jesse Bertron
Austin, Texas

Jesse Bertron is a plumber’s apprentice living in Austin, Texas. He has an MFA in Poetry from Vanderbilt University. He is co-director of Poetry at Round Top, an annual festival in rural Texas.