The winner of 2024 Chapbook contest is Molly Bolton for her collection What Blooms in the Dark
The poems in What Blooms in the Dark wander through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the grocery store with a mother grieving the death of her preterm twins.
Molly Bolton is a writer and spiritual care provider outside of Boone, North Carolina. Her writing appears in Susurrus Magazine, Whale Road Review, Hippocampus, and, weekly, at enfleshed.com. Molly was named a 2022 North Carolina Gilbert-Chappell Series Emerging Poet. A clinically trained chaplain, Molly spends their time companioning folks into liberative frameworks of spirituality, and walking in the woods with her child.
The Poets Corner, Toad Hall Editions and the Camden Festival of Poetry joined together to sponsor the 2024 Chapbook Contest with distinguished poet, Marie Howe, as the contest judge.
All the world at once is what is held in the lines of these poems: the birthers, the babies who will not live, the faces of flowers, the stones, the salamanders, the trees, the saints, the living woman who sings these sentences into a rigorous music of what it is to be alive: and from it comes poetry that will plead and mourn and hunger and bless. I returned again and again to these poems and was nourished.
—Marie Howe, poet