2024 Contest Results
The High Marsh Press is very pleased to announce Karen Loucks as the winner and Carol Thornton as the runner-up in this year’s chapbook contest. A huge thank you to everybody who participated and took the time to submit.
Winner
The winner of the 2024 Deborah Wills Chapbook contest is Karen Loucks for her manuscript Truth, Hard as a Seed.
Karen’s chapbook will be produced in a limited-edition by students from the printmaking program at Mount Allison University, featuring a letterpress-printed jacket, and will be published by The High Marsh Press in the spring of 2025.
Runner-up
Honourable mention goes to Carol Thornton for her manuscript Shadow Games.
Working with students from the printmaking department at Mount Allison University, one of the poems from Shadow Games will be produced as a limited-edition letterpress broadside and published by The High Marsh Press.
About Karen Loucks
Karen Loucks (formerly Chester) lives and writes in Victoria, B.C., the unceded traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples. She currently works as a clinical counsellor with a special interest in grief and loss. Her poetry has been previously published in the following anthologies: Worth More Standing; Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds; Voicing Suicide; Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry; Poems from Planet Earth; and in two chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane. Most recently she had a poem longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize (2023).
About Carol Thornton
Carol Thornton is co-author of Writer on Fire: Poetry Prompts to Ignite the Poet Within. She studied Creative Writing at Oxford and was granted an MA from the University of East Anglia. Her poetry and short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, England, Ireland, the USA and Romania (in translation), and won several competitions. A radio play was broadcast on CBC Radio. She lives and works in Canmore, Alberta in Canada's Rocky Mountains.
About the 2024 Judge
Triny Finlay (she/they) is a queer and genderfluid poet, writer, scholar, teacher, and mother. Their books include Myself A Paperclip, winner of the 2022 New Brunswick Book Award for Poetry, and the critically-acclaimed collections Histories Haunt Us and Splitting Off, along with the chapbooks Anxious Attachment Style, You don’t want what I’ve got, and Phobic. They live on the unceded and unsurrendered land of Wolastoqiyik, where they teach English and Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.
Photo: Alexis McKeown
