Finishing Line Press

2026 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition

A prize of $1,500 and publication by Finishing Line Press is given annually for a poetry chapbook written by writers who identify as women who have not published a full-length collection.
Manuscripts written in a language other than English are accepted when accompanied by an English translation.
Hybrid manuscripts (e.g., prose poetry or formal verse) are welcome, and art may also be included.
We do allow art to be included with the manuscript. Please follow page count guidelines. One page of art is equal to one page of poetry.

In addition to the winner, 10 manuscripts will be accepted for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series.
This series is now in its 28 year.

Submit a manuscript of 16 to 34 pages of poems, title page, table of contents page,
a brief bio, acknowledgments, and a cover letter
with a $20 entry fee.
Please do not include your name on the manuscript. The bio should be included on the cover letter only.
All entries are considered for publication.
Deadline: October 15, 2026
Final Judge: Molly Fisk
FLP strongly encourages submission via our submittable page: http://finishinglinepress.submittable.com/submit , or use the button below.

A word about the judge:

Screenshot
Poet and essayist Molly Fisk is the author of 10 books, most recently Walking Wheel, a novel-in-verse (Red Hen Press, 2026). She sent poets into schools state-wide and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills.

These are the complete guidelines.

To send a paper manuscript instead:
Finishing Line Press, 2026 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition,
P.O. Box 1626,
Georgetown, KY 40324.

Finishing Line Press Submission Manager Finishing Line Press is an award-winning, small press publisherFinishing Line Press is the home of the New Women's Voices Chapbook Series, the New Women's Voices Prize in Poetry, the Finishing Line Press Prize in Poetry, The Donna Wolf-Palacio Poetry Prize, and the PADDOCK REVIEW.  We are now accep...

2026 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition

A prize of $1,500 and publication by Finishing Line Press is given annually for a poetry chapbook written by writers who identify as women who have not published a full-length collection.
Manuscripts written in a language other than English are accepted when accompanied by an English translation.
Hybrid manuscripts (e.g., prose poetry or formal verse) are welcome, and art may also be included.
We do allow art to be included with the manuscript. Please follow page count guidelines. One page of art is equal to one page of poetry.

In addition to the winner, 10 manuscripts will be accepted for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series.
This series is now in its 28 year.

Submit a manuscript of 16 to 34 pages of poems, title page, table of contents page,
a brief bio, acknowledgments, and a cover letter
with a $20 entry fee.
Please do not include your name on the manuscript. The bio should be included on the cover letter only.
All entries are considered for publication.
Deadline: October 15, 2026
Final Judge: Molly Fisk
FLP strongly encourages submission via our submittable page: http://finishinglinepress.submittable.com/submit , or use the button below.

A word about the judge:

Screenshot
Poet and essayist Molly Fisk is the author of 10 books, most recently Walking Wheel, a novel-in-verse (Red Hen Press, 2026). She sent poets into schools state-wide and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills.

These are the complete guidelines.

To send a paper manuscript instead:
Finishing Line Press, 2026 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition,
P.O. Box 1626,
Georgetown, KY 40324.

Finishing Line Press Submission Manager Finishing Line Press is an award-winning, small press publisherFinishing Line Press is the home of the New Women's Voices Chapbook Series, the New Women's Voices Prize in Poetry, the Finishing Line Press Prize in Poetry, The Donna Wolf-Palacio Poetry Prize, and the PADDOCK REVIEW. We are now accep....

A Poem by George W. Shuster, Jr.
https://paddockreview.com/2026/09/30/a-poem-by-george-w-shuster-jr-3/

A Poem by George W. Shuster, Jr. George W. Shuster, Jr. lives in Rhode Island and spends much of his time in, on, and around Narragansett Bay. He studied poetry at Columbia University and the University of Virginia, and he is a 12…

Sherri Stepakoff will read from her debut poetry collection Sanctuary at Unity Farm, published this summer by Finishing Line Press, and engage in conversation with Kathy Halamka, cofounder of the animal rescue farm Unity Farm Sanctuary on October 20, 2026 at the Needham Public Library, Needham, Massachusetts from 7:30 to 8:30. https://needhamma.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/poet-sherri-stepakoff-sanctuary-at-unity-farm/

Poet Sherri Stepakoff - Sanctuary at Unity Farm Poet Sherri Stepakoff - Sanctuary at Unity FarmSanctuary at Unity Farm transports us to the intimate world of a small New England animal rescue farm to experience the peace and connection the poet finds while visiting with and writing about the beings she encounters there as the Sanctuary’s poet i...

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Sorrel Summer Sky by Shelli Rottschafer

On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/sorrel-summer-sky-by-shelli-rottschafer/

Sorrel Summer Sky is a collection of Earth-Poems accompanied by photography. The poems emerge out of Spring and bloom through the onset of summer into the colors of passing seasons. These poems invite us to pay attention to the small brilliance that Mother Nature provides. They encourage us to act in reciprocity – caring for the earth, our other-than-human relatives, and as a result ourselves. -poetry

Author Shelli Rottschafer (she/her/ella) lives and writes in El Prado, New Mexico and Louisville, Colorado with her partner, Photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie. After years of teaching Spanish at a small Midwestern liberal arts college Shelli began her second act. Sorrel Summer Sky is an example of this multi-media creativity.

PRAISE:

Sorrel Summer Sky could be mistaken for that which is sweet—after all, the speaker both undoes and parallels the James Wright “Blessing” while she looks at a sorrel roan by the roadside, or recalls a mother who guarded the cookie jar. But, look closer and she also “pine[s]/ to land [her] hands/like clawed question marks through [that horse’s] tresses.” This longing isn’t saccharine, but rather constructs a self-informed and complicated literary-ancestry. The poems are alive to earth joy and are an earth elegy as the language pays homage to Sappho, Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard, Linda Hogan, Lauren Camp, Ocean Vuong. And of course, under all of this, the poet’s partnership with her husband, the photographer Daniel Combs, whose interspersed images continue a rustic conversation with her verse. His macro photos ask us to zoom in—on the prickly poppy, the prickly pear, the wavy trunk. Rottschafer’s lyric poems ask us to zoom in on the self in a body that both celebrates spring and mourns how many seasons we have left. “Look, where this has led you,” she writes, “to vertigo land within the vermillion/ shade of setting sun.”
–Maya Jewell Zeller, author of Raised by Ferns.

Shelli’s debut collection Sorrel Summer Sky opens with a poem composed for Earth Day, a lamentation that names how we have fenced off and partitioned up the land, littered it, and fracked it open. These are walking poems, in the tradition of Wordsworth who rambled and wrote. These are nature poems, in tradition of Dickinson who closely observed and celebrated the world lifting up its wonders to our mind’s eye. Scattered, like wild flowers among her technicolor sonnets, sestina-adjacent poems, and Sapphic stanzas, are the black and white photos of her partner Daniel. This collaboration between a poet and a photographer calls us back to the wonder and beauty of this world. It reminds us that life itself is mutuality and that the only way forward is through an ethic of care.
–Jeremy Paden, poet & translator. World as Burning Sacred Heart, 2021.
“Intelligence and knowing are two different things,” writes poet Shelli Rottschafer in “Equal Parts: Hydrogen to My Oxygen.” And though others may well cite “intelligent” facts about prickly pears, paddle cactus, orange globe mallow, lanternflies, sandhill cranes, and javelinas, Rottschafer knows them, encountering them with reverence, heart, and her lyric gifts. She sees sap oozing from a felled tree and takes it as a “blood sign of life,” evidence of nature’s drive toward renewal in the wake of disaster. “The hope is to heal,” she tells us in poems as healing as a hike through mountain wildflowers on a summer morning.
–Julie Kane, author of Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems, 2025. Louisiana Poet Laureate 2011-2013.
In “Shooting at the Stars,” about halfway through Sorrel Summer Sky, Shelli Rottschafer includes a line that could serve as a thematic statement for poems that immerse poet and reader in landscape: “There is more to heaven than just the skies.” Like the remarkable photographs that illuminate Rottschafer’s pages, these poems focus the eye on the flora and fauna of our mountain West. “What do we truly see / even when it is right before our eyes?” the poet asks. Here, we see it all.
–David Meischen, author of Caliche Road Poems, 2024.
From the smallest detail of a prickly pear’s thorns to grand vistas, these poems attend to the natural world through the eyes of a nature writer—primarily Shelli Rottschafer’s beloved, adopted northern New Mexico—observing change and, often, worlds of color. The black and white photographs by Daniel Combs are radiant in a different way; together, these poems and photographs document beauty, and bring readers a glimpse of a rich world of human connection to earth and sky. And, don’t miss the notes at the end, an integral part of the experience.
–Carol D Guerrero-Murphy, poet. Chained Dog Dreams, 2019 and Bright Path, Dark River, 2020.
Sorrell Summer Sky walks the ridge line between the sublime drama of North America’s mountain west and the little daily traumas of living in the 21st century United States. In Rottschafer’s poems you sense the gnarled natural landscape, everything subtly alive and pulsing. Old, dammed-up rivers appear alongside John Deere tractors in the field, and her persistent and piercing gaze gives us poems about birds, stars, and wild horses. But the tensions of living in America today never disappear. These magic poems dwell in a thoughtfulness born in a persistent, unflinching gaze. Daniel Combs’s photographs punctuate these quietly intense poems, and remind us of what Rottschafer’s poems ask us to remember: the greatest gift of life is to see the world clearly, and with as much admiration and wonder as does this poet in her moving debut volume.
–Pablo Peischera, whose poetry appears in Pleiades, Shenandoah, & Copper Nickel.
This collection of poems and photos, like the solid hair grown back over a roan’s scar, and swimming in the reflective pool of its healing and forgiving eyes, reminds us of life’s give and take. They are a composite of a journey where each word, each image, like every minute, has not been taken for granted. Perhaps, they are an offering of what others prefer to forget. Undeniably, they are a gift whose pages wing a woken mind escaping what once had been. They are for those who relish nature’s offerings and all which we choose to remember season after season, scar after scar, amidst the beauty in the landscapes of our lives.
–Levi Romero, Inaugural New Mexico State Poet Laureate, 2020-2023. In the Gathering of Silence 1996, A Poetry of Remembrance 2008, and Sagrado 2013.
“For those who dare, dive, and dance / around her flood-tide, // she bears witness.” In her chapbook Sorrell Summer Sky, Shelli Rottschafer bears witness to a generous world in need of reciprocity. Rife with sensory details and speckled with evocative photographs, Rottschafer guides us toward what she sees: piñón, turquoise, felled trees, Perseids, and the threats encroaching on the landscapes we love.
–Erica Reid, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize 2023. Author of Ghost Man on Second, 2024. Fort Collins Poet Laureate 2026-2028

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FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Fragile Intersect by Lynn Kincanon

On SALE: https://finishinglinepress.com/product/fragile-intersect-by-lynn-kincanon/

Fragile Intersect operates with the steady hand of an observer who knows the rhythm of the human heart—both its biological fragility and its emotional resilience. Drawing from thirty-six years specializing in cardiology at the bedside of Emergency Room, ICU, and Telemetry Units, Lynn Kincanon offers a rare clarity, seeking a respite for the soul through steadfast observation and sharp, detailed imagery. At its core, Fragile Intersect is a contribution to the established Medical Humanities and emerging field of Lyric Medicine. It is a vital exploration of healing, trauma, and the transition from a life of service to the freedom of retirement. By the final poem, the author has begun her own “transformation from autumn’s color to whiteness,” leaving the reader with a profound sense of gratitude for the journey traveled.

Lynn Kincanon is a poet of steadfast observation whose work pulses with “lyrical lifeforce energy.” As the Poet Laureate of Loveland, Colorado Emerita (2022–2025), she is a defining presence in the contemporary poetry scene of Northern Colorado, recognized for a style that balances nature-infused imagery with profound emotional resonance. Her writing offers a rare clarity informed by a distinguished thirty-six-year career in nursing and as a Nurse Practitioner specializing in cardiac care, allowing her to monitor the human heart through a dual lens of clinical precision and soulful evocativeness. A dedicated mentor and collaborator, Lynn is the author of two chapbooks, Evocation, and Art as Metaphor, Analogy and Allegory (self-published 2013) and the forthcoming collection, Fragile Intersect (Finishing Line Press 2026). Website: lynnkincanon.com

PRAISE:
These poems listen for the moment when the body’s capacity to be a body falters or resumes. With care, Kincanon’s poems evoke the life-world of the one whose work it is to nurse, equally so: “Stepping over the threshold,/ I feel a tender swaying.” This instinct towards pendulation is carried through the collection, which alternates between the ward, and the plush liminality of the natural world. Transcribing, owl “hoots,” a “ridgeline” coyote glimpsed in the browning grass, the bright flash of a heron plucking a koi from the garden pond, the poet-nurse restores her own being, a form of soft attention that functions as an antidote, medicine in its own right.
–Bhanu Kapil
Fragile Intersect, indeed! These poems straddle grittiness and gratefulness, blue sky and Code Blue, honeysuckle berries and the ICU, listening to birdsong and the heart’s faithful lub dub, lub dub. I love these poems that point equally to our mortality and to the great gift of life. Perceptive, compassionate, and lyrical, these are clear-eyed, open-hearted invitations to be as present and vulnerable in our lives as this remarkable nurse poet.
–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
Fragile Intersect is a debut poetry collection that listens closely at the crossing of life and loss. Drawing on years as a poet and former cardiac nurse, Lynn Kincanon writes with a clear-eyed tenderness shaped by hospital rooms, mountain mornings, and the quiet urgencies that arrive when time feels finite. I love how these poems attend to crickets before the freeze, fog-draped moons, parting blessings, and the beauty we leave behind. With language that is compassionate but unsentimental, Fragile Intersect embodies what it means to live more mindfully and to count what matters. With sensory richness and surprising turns of thought, these moving poems stand at the intersection where mortality sharpens gratitude.
–Evan Oakley, M.A.,MFA Professor Emeritus. English, Communications, Literature Department Aims Community College.
Lynn Kincanon has experienced the intersect of living and dying in a way that few of us have, or ever will. Thirty-six years spent in Emergency Rooms, ICUs, and cardiac surgery nursing have taught her to cherish life in all of its fearsome and fragile moments. These poems embrace the extremes of hospital halls where alarms ring constantly for attention and give honor to the quiet confessions of heart patients accepting that their next breath may be their last. Somehow, she finds a way to be kind to even the family members who refuse to let go and let their loved ones stop endlessly suffering when recovery is not possible. As an antidote to an ever-present atmosphere of life-and-death crisis, Lynn is a clear-minded island of calm. She is dubbed “The Electric Nurse” for her ability to always be there in time with the defibrillator paddles. She can literally shock a person back into life and still take the time to listen to the deepest longing, regrets, and wishes of heart patients facing their mortality. It is no surprise then that she becomes a fine gardener and observer of nature, saving katydids and wounded butterflies, placing a chunk of watermelon in her garden for the bees to suckle, while acquiescing to the harsh cycle of nature as a blue heron invades her pond to suck down her carefully nurtured koi. These extraordinary poems take us inside the halls of complex, throbbing hospitals, but mostly, they take us inside the heart of this fierce, tender, fearless and uncompromising poet. She gives us “the holy grail of the world, to love/and be loved, to praise the world, to love/ the world, to love yourself in the world.” She is a “pathfinder searching/ for whatever it is that will sustain.” Reach out and touch a beating heart with Lynn Kincanon, and like her, you will never be the same.
–Lorrie Wolfe, author of The Language of Crows, winner of the Fledge Chapbook Prize
In Celtic traditions, Samhain is that leaf-turning time of year when veils between worlds are said to grow thin: light and dark, life and death. As an ICU and ER nurse and cardiac nurse practitioner, Lynn Kincanon lived in Samhain almost all the time, walking the night hallways, tending to the dying, the grievously ill, and those luckier souls fighting back towards the light. An archeologist of the liminal and flashpoints of human grace, she knows things that many of us do not. These emotionally powerful poems are reports from those shadowlands.
–John Calderazzo, Colorado State University Professor emeritus and author of In the Soup: Poems.
Lynn Kincanon, the poet of Fragile Intersect, was a nurse for thirty-six years “because in the distant past death came knocking twice.” She senses a crucial time: “This morning, like the cricket, I feel an urgency.” She wants to have “That much desire, // … that much to praise” (from “Good Luck Morning”), the opening poem in this book. This collection of poems is both brilliant and moving. “An Ending and a Beginning,” about Kincanon’s father—“He forgets where he is, who we are.” He was once a prisoner of war. “He’s leaving us soon, we know this, and he is ready, already / talking to the moon, to his mother, to his sister, all dead years ago. / They’re calling him home. / He sees them flying across the room, asks us if we can see them / asks if we can hear them, and if we listen really hard / we can, we can.” In “Flying Lessons,” “The Blue Heron was showing me my next life / waiting for me to join her. // Today at the River’s Edge / She was teaching me to fly.” And “What Your Heart Says” is “this morning / as I lay my head on your chest in bed / and listened, I was remembering all the hearts, / all the times I was granted such grace… the murmurings of another human’s heart.”
–Veronica Patterson, poet of How to Make a Terrarium, Swan, What Shores?, Thresh & Hold, & it had rained, and Sudden White Fan. She was Loveland’s first Poet Laureate.
Lynn Kincanon’s debut book of poetry, Fragile Intersect (Finishing Line Press), is a hymnal of human struggle singing with compassion. Based on her multiple decades as a nurse and nurse practitioner, the setting is the trauma room—emergency and ICU–and walking in the wild. Tough and tender patients are her subject. Kincanon brings us into their bodies and turns us toward our own.
–Beth Lechleitner, Loveland Poet Laureate 2025-2027

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