Gasher Book Award
The Gasher Book Award is open to any writer based in the United States, regardless of publication history. The winner will receive $1,000 + Publication and 20 free copies.​
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2025 Gasher Book Award
Final Judge
Melissa Kwasny
About this year's judge
​Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions 2024), Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today, and Pictograph, as well as Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision. She is also the editor of two anthologies: I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights and Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. Her book of nonfiction, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear, explores the cultural, labor, and environmental histories of clothing materials provided by animals. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Award and Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a work in progress, and a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She was Montana Poet Laureate from 2019-2021, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker.
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Guidelines
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We accept poetry (hybrid works are welcome) books between 48-90pgs, excluding front and back matter.
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Simultaneous submissions are okay. Please withdraw your work immediately if it is accepted elsewhere.
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Once work is submitted, it can not be revised or edited. If your submission is selected, you will have the opportunity to submit a revised manuscript at that time. Please do not email revised versions of the original works or attach revisions to your submission on Submittable. We will not consider it.
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We only accept unpublished works. Sections previously published as a chapbook or individual poems are okay, but the manuscript as a whole should be unpublished. Self-publishing is considered published.
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This is a blind screening. Do not include any identifying information on the manuscript, including in the file name.
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Manuscripts must include a table of contents.
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No preambles or bios are permitted to be included in the manuscript.
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No acknowledgements in the manuscript, but you may submit this information in the cover letter field on Submittable.
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Please include a bio and brief synopsis of the work in the designated fields on Submittable.
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Submit as .pdf or .docx, 12pt font. One poem per page.
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This prize is open only to those who currently reside in the United States.
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Friends, current/past students, or affiliates of the editors and/or Melissa Kwasny are not permitted to submit. Current Gasher Press authors are not permitted to submit.​
2024 Winner
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Eliza Guerra
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Holograms in the Field
Holograms in the Field is an assemblage of five long poems. Each poem is a meditation on a field—a Remedios Varo painting, a John Cage string quartet, a Martha Graham dance—where the self is a fold in the fabric of being, where selves unfold into particles in the fog. The book is an atmosphere study, where everything is waves dancing with tonal interchangeability, where the sentence is a landscape stretching between horizons. Using the breath as a compass, and the breath-like long line as a practice, these poems wait for the exhale to spill the body into expanse.
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Eliza Guerra is the author of the chapbook Feral Ecology (Bottlecap Press 2024). Her poems are in Annulet, ballast, Glass, TAGVVERK, and elsewhere.
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