The Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

The Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize

$1,000 + Publication

2024 Judge: Carolyn Hembree

Established in 2001, The Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize highlights one book a year that excels in the chapbook format. Since 2024, the Prize comes with a $1,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 10 copies of the published book.

Submissions open each year on January 1 and close on March 31.

Guidelines, Submissions, and List of Previous Winners

Winner of the 2023 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize:

Dumb Luck & other poems, by Christine Kitano

Selected by Alison Pelegrin

Submission Guidelines

Submit to The Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize

General Guidelines

A fee of $20 must be paid at the time of submission.
Open to any poet writing in English. Translations are not eligible.
Poems may have been published individually in magazines or anthologies, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please notify TRP immediately by withdrawing the manuscript via Submittable if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere.
Current and former students and faculty of Sam Houston State University are not eligible.
Family and current or former students* of the final judge or TRP staff are not eligible.
Current and former TRP authors are not eligible.
Submitters must be 18+ years of age.
Submissions are accepted through Submittable only.
Winner will receive a $1,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 10 copies of the published book.

*Writers who studied with TRP staff or the final judge for a semester-length period are not eligible. Writers who studied with TRP staff or the final judge for two-week residencies, single workshops, or other instances less than a semester in length are eligible, provided the work submitted is previously unseen by TRP staff or the final judge.

Manuscript Guidelines

Manuscripts may be no longer than 40 pages.
Please include a table of contents, title page, and page numbers.
Do not include an acknowledgments page.
No more than one poem per page.
Submissions are judged on an anonymous basis. Please remove any identifying information from the manuscript.
Submit as a .pdf, .docx, or .doc file format.
No revisions will be accepted once the manuscript is uploaded.

Carolyn Hembree

Carolyn Hembree’s third poetry collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press as part of their Barataria Series, edited by Ava Leavell Haymon. She is also the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

Robert Phillips

Robert Phillips (1938-2022), for whom this competition is named, is the author or editor of over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, an American Academy and Institute of Arts Letters Award in Literature, a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS Grant in Poetry, MacDowell Colony and Yaddo Fellowships, a National Public Radio Syndicated Fiction Project Award, a Syracuse University Arents Pioneer Medal, and Texas Institute of Letters membership.