MapLiterary
contemporary writing & art
The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
Named after our late colleague, this award honors beautiful, original writing through publication as a print chapbook; this year we are happy to include and an e-book version as well. The 2026 winner is Kent Kosack, will receive a $1,000.00 honorarium and 25 copies of the print chapbook for his collection of creative nonfiction, PROSE SCRAPS. The chapbook will be available in print in September, and as an e-book within 90 days following, on Amazon.com.
In this deep, unflinching collection of essays, Kent Kosack collects the debris of a life—half-empty paint cans buried in the woods, Rate My Professor reviews, a voicemail about downhill skiing that was never really about skiing—and arranges it into something startlingly whole. Moving between a childhood of house-flipping and hard falls, a friendship with a man undone by mental illness, and a father's long, foggy exit through Alzheimer's, Prose Scraps asks what we're left holding when the people we love come apart in pieces.
Kosack writes in the tradition of the essay as excavation, in conversation with Louise Bourgeois's cells, Giacometti's walking men, and Bob Dylan's Jokerman—looking to art for a way to hold what memory keeps dropping. The result is a chapbook of fierce tenderness and dark humor: a son trying to carry his father's failing body and failing mind at once, and finding, in the scraps left behind, a strange kind of light.
Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. He has recent work in Minor Literature[s], Heavy Feather Review, 3:AM Magazine, Some Words, and elsewhere. His novella, Adar’s Freedom, is available through Subtle Body Press. You can read more at kentkosack.net
Advance Praise for Prose Scraps
As these intelligent, searching accounts of life, loss, and stubborn resilience clearly demonstrate, Kosack is fully capable of achieving the controlled and graceful lift his younger self desired, and executing the perfect landing.
--Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts
Kent Kosack is the real deal. In prose that is as clear-eyed and deft as it is compassionate, Kosack brings us to the most subtle, fragile stuff of what it is to be human: longing, regret, loneliness, kinship, and connection.
--Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Associate Deputy Editor, Poets & Writers
The chapbook illustrates the power of what remains, even after our memories have gradually faded away.
--Jess Jelsma Masterton, Director of Susquehanna University Press
Kosack looks at the world around him with such depth of curiosity and thoughtfulness. Perfect examples of the wonderful, beautiful magic the very best essays can showcase.
--Aaron Burch, Editor, Short Story, Long and HAD
Wavering between the melancholy and the wry, Prose Scraps is an intimate reading experience full of insightful ruminations and sharp, descriptive language, delivered in a straight-forward tone.
--Faye Wikner
Our 2026 Award Guest Judge was Faye Wikner, who was raised in the lingonberry forests of Sweden, but currently lives in New Jersey with her cat. She received her MFA from William Paterson University, where she teaches Intro to Creative Writing. She was the runner-up for Hayden's Ferry Review Fiction Prize 2025 as well as the runner-up in Feign Lit's The REIGN Prize 2025. Her work has been featured in CRAFT Literary, Short Beasts, The Colored Lens, Crow & Cross Key, and is forthcoming elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram (@userxofy) and https://fayewikner.weebly.com.
Previous winning RWCA chapbooks can be found by clicking here.
Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967-2009
Born in Manhattan, poet and editor Rachel Wetzsteon received degrees from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University. She made her home in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which is the setting for many of her formally assured poems. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Soren Kierkegaard, and Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon infused her urban and emotional landscapes with a dry wit. As critic Adam Kirsch noted in his review of Sakura Park, “Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation.”
Wetzsteon published three collections of poetry during her lifetime: National Poetry Series winner The Other Stars (1994), Home and Away (1998), and Sakura Park (2006), as well as Influential Ghosts (2007), a critical study of poet W.H. Auden. A fourth collection of poetry, Silver Roses (2010), was published posthumously.
Wetzsteon’s honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, as well as a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She taught at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York and William Paterson University in New Jersey, and at the time of her death had recently joined The New Republic as their poetry editor.
[text and picture from The Poetry Foundation]
