Moonstone Arts Center — Moonstone Annual Chapbook Contest 2026

About this call

Moonstone Arts Center, a longstanding presence in Philadelphia's literary community, administers its Annual Chapbook Contest 2026 as a competition with concrete material outcomes rather than an honorific alone. Submissions open June 7, 2026, and close November 14, 2026, under a $20 entry fee. The winning poet receives a $500 cash prize, publication of the chapbook, twenty-five copies of the book, promotion on the Moonstone website, and a reading at one of the organization's Philadelphia venues or a virtual reading at the poet's preference. The call specifies a manuscript of approximately thirty-five pages of poetry. Its central requirement concerns the integrity of the collection: individual poems may have appeared previously in other venues, but the manuscript as a whole must be new. This distinction places the emphasis on the book as a unified artistic object rather than an assemblage of published work, asking the poet to consider sequence, arc, and internal coherence as primary considerations. Moonstone permits simultaneous submissions to other publishers. The contest's structure is clear and its obligations transparent, which allows a serious applicant to assess fit on the merits of the work itself. The chapbook form, at this length, rewards compression, a sustained governing idea, and attention to how individual poems accumulate meaning across the whole.

How to apply