2025 Contest Results
The High Marsh Press is very pleased to announce Sherry Coffey as the winner and Andreas Lohstraeter as the runner-up in this year’s chapbook contest. A huge thank you to everybody who participated and took the time to submit.
Winner
The winner of the 2025 Deborah Wills Chapbook contest is Sherry Coffey for her manuscript Foraging.
Sherry’s chapbook will be produced in a limited-edition by students from the printmaking program at Mount Allison University, featuring a letterpress-printed jacket, and will be published by The High Marsh Press in the spring of 2026.
Judge’s citation for the winning manuscript
Foraging is a beautifully stitched collection of poems tightly connected through gathering edible plants, mostly berries (strawberries, cranberries, blueberries) and fiddleheads. Largely set in moments of searching and gathering, they include the ways these harvests are canned and with us in the off season. Foraging is a gateway to memory with moments of earlier harvests layered onto the present, expanding into themes of parent-child connections, caregiving and impermanence. More than anything, these poems offer a tender concise poetic intensity that make this collection a joy to read.
Judge’s citation for the runner-up
Bearings is an energetic and vivid collection of poems with a strong sense of place. The poems are dynamic, insightful and at times humorous. Place, animal life and human life abound and are intertwined. There is a presence of an office workday, but real life happens outdoors, in the woods, on a boat, or walking past houses. The poet writes, "November's got me –one moment it's claws sting./ the next they soothe" These are luminous poems, full of rich details, that bring us from the page and out into the world.
Runner-up
Honourable mention goes to Andreas Lohstraeter for his manuscript Bearings.
About Sherry Coffey
Sherry Coffey is an award-winning author with poetry in Canadian Literary magazines and an international anthology. Her non-fiction has appeared in Fiddlehead and SubTerrain. She is a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick’s David Adams Richards Prize for fiction. In 2025 she was awarded an ArtsNB Grant for a novel. Born in Whitehorse, Yukon, Coffey currently lives with her family in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
About Andreas Lohstraeter
Andreas Lohstraeter is an emerging writer currently based in Saskatoon in Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. His work has appeared in CV2, Grain, and Prairie Fire, among other journals. He’s in the midst of completing his MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.
About the 2025 Judge
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged). With Ayako Takahashi, she translated a collection of Wago Ryoichi’s poems from Japanese to English titled, Since Fukushima. Her honors include grants from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts. At Mount Allison University, she studied creative writing with Deborah Wills and is a founding editor of the journal 7 Mondays. Currently, she directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Dominican University of California.
