TUPELO PRESS ANNOUNCES THE RESULTS OF THE 2026 SNOWBOUND CHAPBOOK PRIZE

Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Richie Hofmann, has selected In the House of Men by Nina Paláez of Maui, Hawaii as the winner of the 2026 Snowbound Chapbook Prize! Nina Paláez will receive a cash award of $1,000 in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 25 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion. All manuscripts were judged anonymously. 

Nina C. Peláez (www.ninapelaez.com) is a writer based in Maui, Hawaiʻi, where she is Associate Director for The Merwin Conservancy, the former home and 18-acre palm forest of poet W.S. Merwin. A Best New Poets and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Poetry Foundation, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is the recent recipient of The Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholarship, Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award, Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant, and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association/Gwenn A. Nusbaum "Poets to Come" Scholarship. She holds an MFA from Bennington College, where she was a 2025 Alumni Teaching Fellow, and mentors for The Adroit Journal.

Here’s what this year’s judge, Richie Hofmann, had to say about the winning chapbook: 

"Striking and incantatory, the poems of In the House of Men explore the architectures and attitudes of devotion, where the world is always at its most sensuous. 'All day, the bells, they ring and ring,' the poet writes, 'But the buried women have no ears.' Desire rattles in the chambers of these poems, drawn from myth and history, from autobiography and imagination, refining images and insights. What erudite and exuberant work!"

Our sincere congratulations to Nina Paláez and all of our distinguished finalists and semifinalists. 

Finalists for the 2026 Snowbound Chapbook Prize

Sweet (Name)* by Bryan Daly of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Nightbloom by Melissa Ginsburg of Oxford, Mississippi. 

more alphabet [o] by Kristi Maxwell of Louisville, Kentucky.  

Lumenocracy by Cole Swenson of San Anselmo, California. 

Desire & Other Flightless Birds by Marc-Anthony Valle of St. Louis, Missouri.  

When the Thread Breaks by Emily Wolahan of San Francisco, California.  

Semifinalists for the 2026 Snowbound Chapbook Prize

THE TRUE PAINTING OF THE “ISLE OF THE DEAD” BY ARNOLD BÖCKLIN AT THE HOUR OF THE ANGELUS by Matthew Buxton of Chicago, Illinois. 

Neon Boneyard by Andrew Collard of Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

Light List by Caroline Goodwin of Montara, California.  

Press Start (To Continue) by Michael Marberry of Christiansburg, Virginia.   

Cove by Michelle Meier of Hudson, New York.  

Noctiluca by Christopher Nelson of Grinell, Iowa.  

I Begin with Noise, End with an Accent by Samuel Nnadi of Charlottesville, Virginia.  

The Interstellar Botanist by Shanley Poole of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  

Optimism in a Serving Bowl byHajer Requiq of Ksour Essef, Tunisia.  

The Ecstasy of Antigone by Sean Reynolds of South Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

Painter, Couchmaker, God by Nicholas Yingling of Martinez, California. 

Enormous thanks as well to our accomplished team of Preliminary Readers and our final judge, Richie Hofmann, who is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous collections, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review. His honors include the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Our heart-felt gratitude goes out to all who sent us your manuscripts and who, by your writing, link arms in the tireless, solitary, and so-important work of making poetry. So many more manuscripts than we can mention here gave us countless hours of reading pleasure.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we hope you will consider letting us see your manuscript again, as our Summer Open Reading Period is coming up. Thank you and we look forward to reading your work!