We’re so happy to announce the results for the 2018 Digging Press First Chapbook Series. This year’s winner is…

Awabi by Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Fiction)

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is an award-winning author and independent scholar. Her novel Drafts of a Suicide Note was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Permafrost Book Prize, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award, named a semi-finalist for the Conium Review Book Prize, and awarded an honorable mention in the Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. This novel is forthcoming with Regal House Publishing, USA. Her first nonfiction book, Listen We All Bleed, is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. Mandy-Suzanne’s short fiction has appeared in Quail Bell, The Island Review, The Spectacle, The Hypocrite Reader, Conclave, Dark Matter, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere. Her story “Persimmon Wonderseeker and the Mystery of the Deadly Lambshade” was shortlisted for the UK’s Aeon award. Her story “Coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus)” took first prize in the 2018 Eyelands International Flash Fiction Competition hosted by Strange Days Books in Greece. She also writes creative and scholarly essays, which have appeared in Volume!, The Hypocrite Reader,  Sonic Field, and anthologies produced by Open Court, Routledge, Oxford University Press, and Duke University Press. She was a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Evental Aesthetics, a peer-reviewed journal of philosophy, which she still serves as an editorial consultant. She holds a BA from Wellesley College, an MM from the New England Conservatory of Music, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives on the island of Bermuda, where she was born.

We are thrilled to add this amazing chapbook to our series. Awabi will be published by Digging Press in spring 2019.

Our finalists and semi-finalists were:

FINALISTS

Inheritant by Lucia Orellana Damacela (poetry)

The Book Of Blue(s): Tryin’ To Make A Dollar Outta’ Fifteen Cents by henry 7. reneau, jr. (poetry)

Chonga Nation by Letisia Cruz (poetry)

Maria I’m Drunk by Natalie McCann (poetry)

SEMI-FINALISTS (alphabetical)

Virgins in Tiny Boxes by Melanie Márquez Adams (Fiction)

Day Terrors by Jonathan Cardew (Fiction)

The Fleeing Years by Kathy Douglas (Poetry)

Teeth by Jeremiah Driver (Poetry)

Growth Response by Dena Igusti (Poetry)

Shooting Range by Wheeler Light (Poetry)

Silent Witnesses by Karina Lutz (Poetry)

caesura by Paige Melin (Hybrid)

Lovers’ Conversations by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and Reid Mitchell (Hybrid)

The Crossbow Bolt through My Heart by Stephen James Moore (Hybrid)

The Hottentot Lights the Gas Herself by Khaya “Khalypso” Osborne (Poetry)

Sober by Remi Recchia (Poetry)

Willie’s Bad Paper Odyssey by Don Robishaw (Fiction)

Black Girls Burn Blue by Jamilla VanDyke-Bailey (Poetry)

Disco in China by Jianqing Zheng (Poetry)