News! My latest chapbook selected as winner!

I’m delighted to share that my chapbook manuscript The Physics of After has won the 2026 Wolfson Poetry Chapbook Prize and will be published by Wolfson Press in 2027.

This is especially meaningful because the manuscript is so close to my heart. The Physics of After is, at its center, a book about losing my sister and living inside the grief that followed. It’s also about what death changes: family, memory, faith, motherhood, the body, and the ordinary world we still have to keep living in. The poems reach toward science and physical law as a way of asking what happens after a loss that seems to alter everything.

Judge Nancy Botkin

I’m grateful to contest judge Nancy Botkin for choosing the manuscript and for her generous words about the collection. In her citation, she writes that the book’s “structure reaches for empirical logic and reasoning,” while the poems themselves reveal “the messiness of life and the mysteries that defy such logic.” For me, that feels very true to the emotional center of this project, and I'm so happy it came through to the readers and judge.

I’m also grateful to Joe Chaney and Wolfson Press at Indiana University South Bend for giving this chapbook a home. I’m looking forward to working with Nancy and Joe as the manuscript moves toward publication.

You can read the full announcement from Wolfson Press on their website.

I'm looking forward to getting started with work on the manuscript and the publication process (while trying not to think about promotion, which always intimidates me!). In the meantime, I’m sitting with the joy of getting to share this news and feeling very grateful.

With warmth & gratitude,