Black Lawrence Press operates the Black River Chapbook Competition twice each year, a recurring institutional commitment that distinguishes it from one-off contests. The press seeks unpublished chapbooks of poems or prose between 16 and 36 pages, a length that demands concision and structural integrity rather than mere excerpting. The competition is explicitly open to new, emerging, and established writers, signaling that the jury weighs the manuscript itself rather than the author's prior record. The winner receives book publication, a $500 cash award, and ten copies of the book, with prizes awarded on publication. This is a publication prize in the fullest sense: the manuscript enters the press's catalog and reaches readers as a designed, distributed object. For poets and prose writers working at the chapbook scale, the competition offers a rare combination of editorial selection and material production. The curatorial vision favors manuscripts that cohere as a single volume. A chapbook of this length cannot rely on a handful of strong pieces surrounded by filler; the jury will read for sequence, tonal control, and the sense that the whole is greater than its parts. The press's twice-yearly cycle also means that a manuscript not selected in one round may be reconsidered in the next, provided it remains unpublished.