Our 2021 Wallace Award Winner: Rachel Stempel's Interiors

L to R: Rachel Stempel and Julie Molloy

The third biennial Wallace Award from Foundlings Press goes to the poet Rachel Stempel.

The Wallace Award—a prize we introduced in 2017—honors a chapbook and pairs the winning poet with a guest book artist to create original cover art for the publication. The award is named for Wallace “Wally” Canham, Art Director Darren Canham’s dog and our little band’s beloved mascot, lodestar, and occasional production assistant.

2021 Wallace Award Finalists

Submissions for the 2021 Wallace Award opened in late fall 2020. This year saw the largest-ever batch of entries. From this outstanding field, Foundlings Press recognized the following finalists:

• Eric Benick

• Shantha Bunyan

• Selena Cotte (@selenacotte)

• Kristen Steenbeeke (@ksteenbeeke)

• Rachel Stempel (@failed captcha)

Rachel Stempel and Interiors

Rachel Stempel, winner of the 2021 Wallace Award from Foundlings Press, is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and educator. They are a staff writer at Up the Staircase Quarterly and EX/POST MAGAZINE and a poetry editor at MAYDAY Magazine. They are the author of the chapbook BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT (Finishing Line Press 2022) and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Porter House Review, New Delta Review, Penn Review, and elsewhere. They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego.

Rachel’s chapbook Interiors will be available for purchase in winter 2021.

Follow: @failedcaptcha

2021 Guest Artist Julie Molloy

Julie Molloy is an illustrator, designer and art director at Block Club, an award-winning branding and strategy agency in Buffalo. Her gallery work debuted in 2014 in her solo show, Inside Voices, a series exploring the relationship between our public faces and private lives. She has since been featured in The Public and elsewhere, displayed her work at events with partners like Peach Mag, and taken on a wide variety of illustration projects, including designing the cover of Matthew Bookin’s chapbook Palace (Ghost City Press, 2018) and many private commissions. Based in Buffalo, she is currently living and working in Mexico City.

View: https://www.juliemolloy.com/

Follow:https://www.instagram.com/juleeclip/

Previous Wallace Award Winners and Guest Artists

2017: Lytton Smith—My Radar Data Knows Its Thing—Order Here

• Guest Artist: Stephen Fitzmaurice

2019: Nicholas Molbert—Goodness Gracious—Order Here

• Guest Artist: Edreys Wajed

The Wallace Award Returns: Foundlings Announces Third Biannual Chapbook Competition Featuring Artist Julie Molloy

Please note: Submissions for the third biennial Wallace Award are now closed. Foundlings Press will announce the winner in spring 2021. Please check back in December 2022 for the return of our chapbook contest.

The Wallace Award is back.

Only open for submissions once every two years, Foundlings Press offers the Wallace Award to an outstanding poetry chapbook, publishing the winning manuscript with cover art by a guest designer.

This year’s guest designer is Julie Molloy, whose work first charmed and enchanted us at a Peach Mag event in 2018. We left with a painting and with the hope that we might get to collaborate someday.

That day has come. Following previous guest artists Stephen Fitzmaurice (2017) and Edreys Wajed (2019), Julie will team up with Foundlings Press and the eventual winner of the 2021 Wallace Award to produce cover art for the winning manuscript, which Foundlings will publish in fall/winter 2021.

Submissions

Submissions for the third biannual Wallace Award chapbook contest are open from 16 November 2020 to 31 January 2021. Foundlings will announce the final selection in spring 2021.

Requirements

• Length: 20-70 pages

• Format: Word or PDF, remove any/all identifying information

• Style: N/A - we’ll read anything, but please familiarize yourself with our catalog

Entry

Entry is $5, payable through the Foundlings website (link below). Need-based fee-waivers are available—no documentation needed; just email us. Once you’ve paid your submission fee, email your chapbook manuscript as a Word or PDF document to publisher@foundlingspress.com.

Enter here.

More about Julie Molloy

Julie Molloy is an illustrator, designer and art director at Block Club, an award-winning branding and strategy agency in Buffalo. Her gallery work debuted in 2014 in her solo show, Inside Voices, a series exploring the relationship between our public faces and private lives. She has since been featured in The Public and elsewhere, displayed her work at events with partners like Peach Mag, and taken on a wide variety of illustration projects, including designing the cover of Matthew Bookin’s chapbook Palace (Ghost City Press, 2018) and many private commissions. Based in Buffalo, she is currently living and working in Mexico City.

View: https://www.juliemolloy.com/

Follow:https://www.instagram.com/juleeclip/

Goodness Gracious Launch Reading and Reception Jan. 16 at Buffalo Arts Studio

Buffalo Arts Studio
Tri-Main Center, Suite 500
6pm January 16, 2020

Join Foundlings Press for the official launch of Goodness Gracious, a poetry chapbook by Nicholas Molbert, winner of the 2018 Wallace Award.

The event will include a brief reading as well as a pop-up exhibition of original work by Buffalo Arts Studio Studio Artist Edreys Wajed, guest book artist for Goodness Gracious.

Foundlings will host an informal afterparty at the Central Park Grill, a short walk down Main St. from the reading venue.

About Nicholas Molbert and GOODNESS GRACIOUS

Winner of the Foundlings Press Wallace Award, Nicholas Molbert's Goodness Gracious explores creation, distance, landscapes, and the passing of lives. As guest book artist Edreys Wajed puts it, "These poems are light as feathers, hit hard as bricks."

Charged with memory and desire, haunted by heaven and lineage, Nicholas Molbert's poems are sluiced with physical and spiritual longing, unexpectedly tender, sometimes funny, and always moving.

- Mark Wagenaar

Originally from Louisiana's Gulf Coast, Nicholas Molbert lives and writes in Southern Ohio as a PhD student in poetry at the University of Cincinnati. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in journals such as The Adroit Journal, American Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review Online, Ninth Letter, Permafrost, and Pleiades Book Review, among others.

Blurbs and purchase information here.

Retail orders available through SPD.

Watch and listen to Nicholas Molbert reading here.