2024 Chapbook Series!
our four contest winners
Get our exclusive bundle of limited edition print copies from the 2024 Garden Party Chapbook Contest!
Shipments begin in October!
cover art by Shay Alexi Stewart-Willis
What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway?
by Maya Williams
[limited edition print copy]
[digital free PDF--coming Winter 2024]
[accompanying playlist for this chap]
[goodreads page for this chap]
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who was selected as Portland, ME's seventh poet laureate for a July 2021 to July 2024 term. Maya received a MFA in Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry from Randolph College in June 2022. Eir debut poetry collection Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023) was selected as a finalist for a New England Book Award. Their second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date (Harbor Editions, 2023), was selected as a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. Their third poetry collection, What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway?, was selected as one of four winners of Garden Party Collective's chapbook prize in 2024. Maya was selected as one of Maine Humanities Council's recipients of the Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024. Follow her at @emmdubb16 and mayawilliamspoet.com
selected by mónica teresa ortiz
A sorrowful collection birthed from the wound becoming scar—so much wit and wisdom comes through the rupture created from death. These poems are memoriam, dirge, and the rituals and keening to fill the absence of life unalived and ghosting in the psyche. There is nothing wrong with a pity party when the various social spheres we inhabit are in different stages of grief and temporal modes of grieving. Maya offers us a way to proclaim these personal and collective losses with a “good-ass playlist,” “perfect bean bag chairs,” “plenty of wailing and screaming,” and “fifteen therapists properly compensated.”
- Arisa White, Who’s Your Daddy (Augury Books)
red line
by Ashley Elizabeth
[limited edition print copy]
[digital free PDF--coming Winter 2024]
[accompanying playlist for this chap]
[goodreads page for this chap]
Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a winner of the 2024 Garden Party Collective Chapbook Contest. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer and teacher whose work has appeared in SWWIM, Voicemail Poems, Rigorous, and Sage Cigarettes, among others. Ashley is the author of A Family Thing (Redacted Books/ELJ Editions, 2024) and chapbooks CHARM(ed) (Fifth Wheel Press, 2024), black has every right to be angry (Alternating Current, 2023), and you were supposed to be a friend (Nightingale & Sparrow, 2020). She lives on the original land of the Piscataway (Baltimore, MD) with her partner and their cats.
selected by Stephen Furlong
cover art by Christina Ortiz
“i’ve never done this—/written poems for a dead boy—”. With this beginning, Ashley Elizabeth’s red line exemplifies how the hardest grief comes from the hardest love and presents the peace a dedicated educator hopes to find and share. Delving the dark realities far too familiar in this country’s educational systems, these poems capture the tragic knowledge of how to go on when dreams have been deferred or snatched by myriad devils. They are arms wrapped around the shoulders of students, the reader, and the poet. Elizabeth passionately advocates for her students’ humanity and worth, demanding us to more fully see the ways they sneak into the heart of educators, changing our lives more than we hope to impact theirs. This collection presents all that’s lost and found between the bells: the ghosts that haunt halls, both physical and mental. It’s a fitting tribute to the ones who come back to visit, in life or from the next.
​
- Matthew E. Henry, Teaching While Black
cover art by Meera Singh
Night Science
by Kenny Bradley
[limited edition print copy]
[digital free PDF--coming Winter 2024]
[accompanying playlist for this chap]
[goodreads page for this chap]
Kenny Bradley is a poet and graduate student at Rockefeller University, based in New York City, where he travels the boroughs to perform spoken word poetry. He utilizes concepts in both music and biology to influence and shape his poetry to discuss topics ranging in self-love, identity, dissecting trauma, and being a black person in STEM. He was a member of the Provslam 2023 slam team, where he and his teammates won 4 northeast regional slam competitions and self-published a co-authored team chapbook, “Dear Kid, Monster”. He and his teammate Ren L[i]u were finalists for the 2023 Button Poetry Video Contest with their joint poem “Love, Monster.” His work can be found on Button Poetry, Frontier Poetry, Empty House Press, etc. When he is not writing, you can find him in a record store, steaming fresh cup of hot chocolate in hand, spotify in the other as he researches new artists to introduce to his homies. To find more of his work, you can find him on instagram @hotchocolate_poetry.
selected by Laura Villareal
Full-Blooded CHamaole
by Jacob Jardel
[limited edition print copy]
[digital free PDF--coming Winter 2024]
[accompanying playlist for this chap]
[goodreads page for this chap]
Jacob Jardel (he/him) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in English and Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. Jacob lives online at itsjacobj.com, on Twitter/X @itsjacobj96, and on Instagram @itsjacobj. Offline, you can most likely find him in the wild writing, teaching, or working on a writing consultation. When in his natural habitat, though, Jacob is usually watching YouTube with his partner and his cat while hyperfocusing on his special interests, including (but not limited to) Magic: The Gathering, professional wrestling, baseball, and video games.
cover art by Christina Ortiz
selected by Bob Sykora
This chapbook is a powerful testament to how poetry can help us navigate Indigenous identity, diasporic distances, and cultural memories. Through various forms and a wide range of techniques, these poems dive into the vulnerable waters of belonging and the deep currents of home. Jardel is an impressive new author in Pacific and CHamoru literature whose full-blooded poems I will continue to read for many years to come.
- Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory