The 2025 Elgin Awards

Call for Book and Chapbook Nominations

Nominations open March 15. Deadline May 31

Books nominated so far.

2025 Elgin Chair: Juleigh Howard-Hobson

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s poetry has appeared in Amazing Stories, The Dead Lands, Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, Siren’s Call, Midnight Echo, The Audient Void, Dreams and Nightmares, Under Her Skin (Black Spot) Vastarien: Women’s Horror (Grimscribe), and many other places. Nominations include the Pushcart, Elgin, Best of the Net and Rhysling. Her latest book is Curses, Black Spells and Hexes (Alien Buddha). An active member of both the SFPA and the HWA, she lives in a suitably haunted house on the edge of the known world. There are UFOs and werewolves.

2025 Elgin Award Nomination Rules and Procedures:

Please read carefully. If you have questions, please e-mail elgin@sfpoetry.org.

  1. Only current members of SFPA may nominate; however, the author of the nominated book or chapbook need not be an SFPA member.

  2. Only books of speculative poetry first published during 2023 and 2024 are eligible. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. More than half of the poems in the book must be unequivocally speculative as determined by Chair. Translations into English are eligible.

  3. You may not nominate your own books.

  4. You may nominate multiple chapbooks and/or full-length books. Chapbooks must contain 10–39 pages of poetry (or a minimum 300 lines or 2000 words, whichever is less); full-length books must contain 40 pages of poetry or more. For translations, pages of poems in the original language do not count toward the total.

  5. E-books and self-published books are eligible, as well as print. Books that won first–third place in the previous year's Elgin Awards are ineligible, but an eligible title may be nominated two years in a row. Nominations are not automatically carried over from year to year.

  6. To nominate, the book’s title, author, and press name and address (URL or postal) are required. Please also include poetry page count. If available, a link to the press and/or a page where the book can be purchased or downloaded should be provided.

    Authors or publishers may provide a .pdf of the book to facilitate reading for voting consideration. Nominated books must be made available to the Chair upon request to remain eligible.

  7. E-mail nominations to elgin@sfpoetry.org are preferred.

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