2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize

We have always loved chapbooks for their brevity and intensity. With just a few dozen pages, a great chapbook offers the perfect reading experience for the 21st century—not too long, not too short: it’s the Goldilocks zone of the poetry world. Therefore, we wanted to provide chapbooks with what we have done for poems through the Rattle Poetry Prize—a fair, fun, and friendly way to make the most of what they offer. The idea for this project came from our conversation with Jan Heller Levi, who described how the Walt Whitman Award launched her career: “It was wonderful, but it was also a bad introduction to the world of poetry publishing. [Fox laughs] As if every publisher is going to send out 5,000 copies and your book will be everywhere.” Not every publisher can do that—but Rattle can.

In a world where a bestselling full-length poetry book means selling 1,000 copies, the winners will reach an audience more than seven times as large on the first day alone—an audience that includes hundreds of other literary magazines, presses, and well-known poets. This chapbook will be the one to launch a career.

And perhaps the best part is this: every Rattle subscriber will receive a copy of each winning chapbook. Starting in 2018, each quarterly issue of Rattle includes a bonus chapbook delivered to every subscriber, most of which are selected through this annual competition. You can visit the Rattle Chapbook Series page for a full list of selections.