2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award Winner: song & ruins by Allegra Wilson, Selected by Stacey Waite
- Anna Febbraro
- Nov 5
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 8
Congratulations to Allegra Wilson, whose chapbook manuscript, song & ruins, was selected by this year's judge, Stacey Waite, for the 2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award!
Allegra Wilson is a writer living in Northern California with her family. She is the author of a micro-chapbook, sex party at the opera house (Whittle Micro-Press, December 2025), and her work has appeared in ANMLY, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere.
“It is difficult to write poems that are equal parts bold grit and immeasurable tenderness--and it is rare to get to read these kind of poems. This poet has created this stunning and electric equilibrium. The poet writes, "I could fill whole rivers with the mud of what I never meant to do." This powerful line encapsulates the collection--the landscape, the dirt, the awe and regret of what it means to live, and to desire, in a queer body. The poems question norms just as much as they lean into the gritty, beautiful strangeness of imagining it all otherwise.”
–Stacey Waite, 2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award judge
Author of A Real Man Would Have a Gun
about a moth
I’m thinking about a moth.
A small judgment and beautiful:
tall enough that the wings might also be flowers.
Your work is red,
beautiful above the knee.
I feel like too many things in a space that doesn’t
look with eyes.
I think maybe
it’s perfect.
SAVE THE DATE!
Allegra will be reading in Pittsburgh with Kelley Beason and Jan Beatty
at Stay Gold Books, Friday, Nov. 14th, 2025.
Open to self-identifying women or non-binary poets of any age & any publishing history!
The Poet of the Selected Poem will Receive:
25 (twenty-five) copies of their poem in an original limited-edition handset letterpress broadside designed and printed by Ryan Kaune
Praise, adoration, and promotion through social media, literary festivals, independent booksellers, & any other collaborations LBP seeks out.
Finalists may be offered publication as part of LBP's Letterpress Series
Reading Fee:
Pay-what-you-can reading fee via Duosuma tip jar through November 15th! We want to read your work & we don't want the reading fee to keep you from submitting.
BEGINNING November 16, 2025: $5 reading fee per submission
ALL submissions are read by LBP editors & readers with openness and attention, regardless of what you're able to add to our tip jar.
All tip jar donations support LBP's mission to promote the poetry of self-identifying women and non-binary people.
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