WHITE PINE PRESS

White Pine Press is pleased to announce that Elizabeth Chapman has been awarded the thirty-first Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript Our Long Float. Selected by final judge Hélène Cardona, the book will be published in the fall of 2026. Ms. Chapman also receives a cash prize of one thousand dollars.

 

The contest runner-ups were What Meets the Eye by Joanne Durham and The Clouds Have Arrived in Their Armour by Danielle Hanson. The other finalists included Kelly Vande Plasse, Michael Moos, Joseph Bruchac, Pamela Wynn, and Michael Hettich.

 

The Judge, Hélène Cardona says of Our Long Float:

Our Long Float is a luminous meditation on what it means to live — and grieve — in relation to the living, the lost, and the land. From the elephants of Botswana to the trout streams of Montana, Elizabeth Chapman moves through landscapes both physical and emotional, listening closely to what memory, silence, and connection reveal. Grounded in the spirit of ubuntu — I am because you are — these poems honor presence and impermanence, weaving elegy, ecology, and love into a body of work that feels at once deeply intimate and profoundly expansive. With grace, wit, and reverence, Our Long Float offers readers a quiet, radiant map of how to be here — with one another — even as the current carries us onward.

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As a poet, Elizabeth Chapman was a late bloomer. Although born into a literary family (her parents edited and published The Writer magazine and The Writer's Handbook), she wrote her first poem at the age of forty-three. She holds academic degrees from Smith College (BA), The Shakespeare Institute, UK (MA) and Columbia University (PhD). A college teacher of English (Renaissance Literature), and, for twenty years, a psychotherapist in private practice, she lives and writes in Palo Alto, CA.

 

Chapman has seen two full-length collections into print: Candlefish (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) Light Thickens (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009). She is the author of two chapbooks: Creekwalker (MotherTongue Press, 1995) and Midnight Exhibition at the Wheatgrass Saloon (The Orchard Street Press, 2020). Since the year 2000, she has been a member of The Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, CA.