Moonstone Chapbook Contest Winners 2025

Sunday April 26, 2026 @ 2pm ET – VIRTUAL

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The Winning Manuscript: All at Once by Lucia Owen

Unsentimental yet open hearted, these poems capture a married couple’s long and loyal love. The voice is older. The voice is precise, wise, stoic, and self-reliant. It confronts old age with toughness, compassion, and moral strength. I cherish these poems and the spirit behind them more and more each time I read them.

High Honorable Mention: Tarifa Moon by William O’Connell

A collection of many profound delights, these elegant and precise poems take us on a magnificent journey with a husband and wife through Southern Europe. He shares precise reflections on the places visited including the coastal town of Tarifa. The speaker’s voice is learned, observant, open to awe and discovery of self and place.

Honorable Mention: Bright Clatter by Susan Coppock

These are unforgettable, precise, and stoic poems of a girl’s coming of age and her relationship with her beautiful, cold, and often rejecting actress mother. We get glimpses of her free-spirited dating life during the 1950s and 1960s. These are stirring and compelling poems.

Honorable Mention: Shadow House by Ada Lowenthal

These poems captivate with their witty and playful wordplay, their allusions to all manner of things, and their occasional enthusiastic moments of absurdity. I marvel at this poet’s mind and the way in which she darts here and there as she weaves eclectic images and observations together.

PLUS These Exceptional Poets

Aliyah Cotton, author of The Lungs Remember Breath, her work appears in Adroit, Cortland Review, Emerson Review, Grub Street Literary Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Rust & Moth, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and South Carolina Review.

Anne Greenhaigh, author of Half sun, half shade: a sequence of sestinas, Her debut chapbook, Now that mother is dead, all quilts unravel in the end, published by Moonstone Press, features a double crown of sonnets that explore themes of time, memory, and loss.

Vincent Hostak, author of The Strangest Fire poems have been featured in literary journals including The Dewdrop, Sonder Midwest (Iowa), The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and more. He writes & produces a podcast, the Phantom Script, examining the evolution of the world’s most accessible form of literature and how it reaches others.

Stacie Kiner, author of Abby Road Her poems have appeared in Calyx, The Charlotte Poetry Review, Madison Review, Comstock Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Apalachee Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Lavender Review, Panoply, Plainsong, Rhino, and more.

Brandy Reinke, author of Remnants of the Injury of Finding the Known, published pieces in: The Redrock Review, Esthetic Apostle, Tulane Review, Glassworks, Big Muddy Review, Microfiction Monday Magazine, Moonstone Arts, Unleash Press, Hare’s Paw Journal, and the HCE Review.

Meri Tumanyan, author of Why I Pray in Armenian, a first-generation Armenian-American, earned a B.A. in English and Comparative Literary Studies from Occidental College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from CSUN. For her, writing is an exploration—a journey toward reconciliation, hope, fresh perspectives, and a deeper self-awareness.