2025 Micro Chapbook Prize: Winners & Finalists
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2025 Micro Chapbook Prize! Please join us in congratulating these brilliant poets. Deep gratitude to all who shared excellent collection of poems with us—we are so lucky to have been immersed in the worlds of your work. The four winning micro chapbooks were selected by Palette editors and will each receive a $500 award, free digital publication, and 10 complimentary physical copies in March 2026.
Winners of the 2025 Micro Chapbook Prize
For our winter winner — Max Gillette for Fission
Max Gillette is a queercrip poet from Detroit, MI. Their work has been published in Variant Literature, Arkana Magazine, HAD, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sage Cigarettes, and elsewhere. Max’s poetry has been republished in prosody guides and nominated for Best of the Net. Max received a BS in English literature from Central Michigan University and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Ohio State where they read and edit creative nonfiction for The Journal.
For our spring winner — Sasha Wade for Notes From The Field
Sasha Wade, an emerging writer, is currently working on her first book of poetry, a portion of which will include reflections on the poems of her great-grand father, Alirio Diaz Guerra, who was a novelist and a poet. Sasha, a 2016 and 2022 attendee of The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, holds an MFA from Bennington’s Writers Seminar. Sasha’s poetry has been published in Rust + Moth, The James Dickey Review, Front Porch Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Third Wednesday, and The Chestnut Review. She is also the winner of The Baltimore Review’s Winter 2024 Prose Poem Contest. Several of her poems have been shortlisted in the prominent Bridport Poetry Contest.
For our summer winner — Stephanie Chang for The Fragrant Blue Garden of Saints
Stephanie Chang (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based art historian, writer, and editor. Her work appears in The Rumpus, Sixth Finch, Adroit Journal, Waxwing, Poets.org, Strange Horizons, and The Offing, among others. She won the 2021 Adroit Prize for Poetry, judged by Carl Phillips; her poem, “Lotus Flower Kingdom,” was selected for inclusion in the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology and awarded a Special Mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. A first-generation college graduate, she holds a BA in Art History and English with Distinction in Creative Writing at Kenyon College, where she interned at The Kenyon Review and received the Academy of American Poets College Prize. Stephanie was born and raised in western Canada by immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. She is interested in queer ecologies and the eroticism of the ocean, and currently at work on a sapphic eco-horror fantasy YA novel.
For our fall winner — Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger for How to Write an Essay
Lucy Wainger is a poet from New York City. Her debut chapbook In Life There Are Many Things won the Black River Chapbook Competition. She earned an MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst and currently lives in Chicago, where she is a fifth-grade assistant teacher.
Finalists
Amanda Chiado
Carlos Andrés Gómez
Brian McCabe
Precious Chika Musa
mychael zulauf
Longlist
Justine Berezintsev
George Capaccio
Evan Dekens
Roy Hampton Farrar
finch greene
Gail Ingram
Luis Lopez-Maldonado
Daniel Lurie
Antigone Oreopoulos
Lisa Rhoades
Sam Robison
Ebbie Russell
Richard Scarsbrook
Shebati Sengupta
Aleksander Zywicki