Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce that Christian Yeo‘s chapbook, So Rain, was selected by Joshua Nguyen as the winner of our annual e-chapbook contest. Christian will receive $250 and digital publication.
Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer and actor based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut. His work has been published or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, The Hajar Book of Rage, and New Singapore Poetries, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, and has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, and the Bridport Prize. A Fall ’25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Tin House, Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. He is working on a novel, which was a finalist for the Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship, and a poetry collection. He holds a BA in Law from Cambridge.
We are also excited to announce that Jay Délise’s chapbook, herb of the sun, was this year’s Editor’s Choice. Jay will receive $150 as well as publication.
Jay Délise (they/them) (official jester of Sugar Hill) is a writer, performance artist, and eater of grapes, based in Harlem, New York. They have performed at the United Nations, the Schomburg Center, Judson Church, the Pulitzer Center, and Roundhouse. Their 2020 self-published poetry collection tenderhead. debuted at #1 in poetry audiobooks on Libro.fm and their work has been featured in publications including Glass Poetry Press, Huffington Post, Lucky Jefferson, AFROPUNK, Vagabond City, and Triangle House. Jay has been a teacher and clown consultant/director for almost a decade (old), and their work smells of mischief, church giggles, and being barefoot on unfinished hardwood floors. They enjoy stealing from white people, bad wigs, being gay, fart jokes, jazz music, free art, assuming their mother/father wounds are undetectable, and writing poems about them anyway…
Our runner-up for this year goes to Adrie Rose’s Dear.
Adrie Rose lives next to an orchard in Western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Graywolf Lab: Games, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares blog, and more. Her chapbookI Will Write a Love Poem was published in 2023 by Porkbelly Press, and her chapbook Rupture was published in 2024 by Gold Line Press and longlisted for the MA Book Award. She was a finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2021, named a Highly Commended Poet for the International Gingko
Prize in 2023, and won the 2023 Radar Coniston Prize. She won the Anne Bradstreet Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2022. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.
The entire Sundress team would like to thank Joshua Nguyen for serving as this year’s judge.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kenyon Review, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a humor editor for The Offing and received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University.
We would also like to thank everyone who sent in their work. Finalists and semi-finalists include:
Finalists:
Pretending Not to be Dangerous by Amanda Chiado
Extended Voicemail to a Senator by Meriwether Clarke
FRUITFUL by Gabriela Garcia
Future Streaming Services by Dennis Herbert
GAY POEM WITH BIRD by Slater By The Sea
DAUGHTERING by Tran Tran
Semi-finalists:
make//shift by Carmen Barefield
ITS ALL LOVE by Wayne Benson
I Am Not Alone: Poems by Guillermo Filice Castro
Between Razor Wire and the Sea by Maryah Converse
Disintegrations by Babette Cieskowski
A Casual Apocalypse in Acapulco by Andelica Esquivel
They Would’ve Named Me Juan by Jonathan Fletcher
Fed by Hannah Flynn
Where Angels Fear to Tread by Vishwas R. Gaitonde
Alchemy for Nests by Beth Gordon
Archipelagic by Saquina Karla C. Guiam
Lip Balm, Loose Change, Handkerchief by Don Hogle
Passing Notes in Secret by Melanie Hyo-In Han
After Inferno, Snowfall on a Scarred Landscape by Ariel Machell
SPEAKER/UNSPEAKER by Emma McCoy
How to Fall Out With God by Oisín Rowe
Divinations by Saudnamini Siegrist
mosquitologically by Elizabeth Upshu
