Dare to Be chapbook contest winner!

We are thrilled the announce the winner of our 2023 Dare to be Chapbook Contest, Emily Kerlin, for her manuscript, Twenty-One Farewells! From our Judge, Emily Patterson, “Twenty-One Farewells is a meditation on loss in its many forms: loss of earlier selves, of childhood innocence; loss in nature, in the death of animals both wild and domestic; loss of trust, home, expectation, connection.”

Twenty-One Farwells tells of the many ways loss can manifest in our lives through addiction, mental illness, pandemic shutdown, divorce, parenting, and in our intersection with the natural world around us. I look at my mother and my daughter–and really all women– and feel connected through our farewells, the ones that anguish us and the ones that liberate us.

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Emily Kerlin has called the following things home: a 13-tatami-mat flat in Japan, a gaff-rigged schooner in Manhattan, a stone home on an island in Lake Michigan, a blue left-zip mummy bag in British Columbia, a Guatemalan trimaran in Micronesia, a ski lodge in Montana and a small town near the Baltic coast of Germany. Her current home sits at 728 feet above sea level in Urbana, Illinois where she has been teaching the difference between “chicken” and “kitchen” to English language learners in public schools for the last 20 years. She has published poems in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Bridge, Storm Cellar, The Pittsburg Poetry Journal, The MacGuffin, Split Rock Review and Blue Mountain Review.