Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest
Submissions are open!
See the Contest Results page for information on last year’s winning entries.
Produced by the High Marsh Press and students from Mount Allison University, the annual Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest honours an outstanding poetry chapbook by a poet with no previous book publication.
The winning poet receives $500 and will have their chapbook produced by students from the Mount Allison University Fine Arts Department.
We welcome all genres of poetry, from formal verse to free verse to prose poems. Chapbooks must be 12 pages or fewer.
If you have any questions about the contest, do not hesitate to contact us at highmarshpress@gmail.com
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.
About the contest’s namesake
Deborah Wills taught for many years in the English Department at Mount Allison University (1995-2019), where she specialized in Creative Writing, Critical Theory, and Contemporary Literature. Her achievements as teacher and scholar were recognized by the Herbert and Leota Tucker Award for Excellence in Teaching (2004), the Paul Pare Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research (2010), and the Charles and Joseph Allison Chair in English Literature (2011-2016). Less formally but perhaps even more importantly, her contribution to the Mount Allison community was recognized by the universal esteem of her colleagues and students, whose lives she continually enriched. Her passion for reading, for writing, and for talking about literature was profound and infectious. Although she enjoyed all the courses she taught, Dr. Wills was perhaps most deeply engaged by the six-credit Creative Writing course she developed on the workshop model. Each year roughly a dozen upper-year students had the privilege of working closely with her and each other for eight months, developing their craft in various genres in an atmosphere of mutual support. Unfailingly encouraging as well as insightful in her response to students’ work, Dr. Wills had the pleasure of seeing several of her alumni achieve acclaim at the national level. Her own creative writing was recognized by Matrix Magazine (1997), the CBC Literary Awards (2010), the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick (2010 and 2012), the Kyle Prize for Short Fiction (2014).