Happy National Poetry Month! At Brain Mill Press, we like to celebrate all month long by sharing featured poets, which we are excited to do again this year. We are also excited to be sharing “reprise” poetry from some of our prior-year contest winners, making for an exciting month of poetry!

We are also excited to announce a new collaboration with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets for a chapbook contest. The contest is open to all Wisconsin poets for an unpublished chapbook. The winning chapbook will be published by Brain Mill Press, with an expected publication date of Spring 2025.

Contest entries will be judged by poet Tracy Mishkin.

• Open to all Wisconsin poets, with a particular interest in voices under-represented in traditional publishing, such as writers of color, women, indigenous voices, disabled writers, queer writers.
• Eligible manuscripts will be 18-30 pages in length.
• WFOP will award $250 to the winning chapbook.
• Brain Mill Press will provide a standard royalties-bearing publishing contract with ISBN, print and e-book formats.
• Brain Mill Press will also provide design and publishing support.
• Entries will be accepted through the Submittable portal. Entry is limited to one chapbook per submitter.
• Contest open April 1 through May 15, 2024

Brain Mill Press seeks to highlight and platform the voices of underrepresented writers. We are inclusive and progressive, with a desire to read a variety of forms, aesthetics, and styles.

Tracy Mishkin is a call center veteran with a PhD and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Butler University. Her first full-length book, The Way The Salt Falls, will be published by Main Street Rag in 2024. She is the author of three chapbooks, I Almost Didn’t Make It to McDonald’s (Finishing Line Press, 2014), The Night I Quit Flossing (Five Oaks Press, 2016), and This is Still Life (Brain Mill Press, 2018). She lives in Indianapolis with her family and fewer than ten cats and dogs.