Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Fall 2022 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Sophia Stid’s But for I Am a Woman.

The lineup is still being finalized—check back soon!

No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through Malvern Books’ YouTube page.

In But for I Am a Woman, Sophia Stid’s work explores the intersection of personal autonomy and deep spiritual connection through the writings and life of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342 – 1416), a mystic who was the first woman known to write a book in the English language, “a woman who had herself / declared dead / so she could write.” Through this companionship, Stid creates a reliquary of language, poems as physical containers for the sacred, gathered like loose rosary beads from the floorboards. It is through the physical body that these poems eloquently chisel a space for reconciliation and grief-healing, bathing “in water, words, and other lives.”

These are poems that seek the liberation of Self, and of womankind, through fluid contemplation as the speaker moves through her own process of grief-healing. She discovers with Julian that “when the book of the world opens, it is not / as we thought,” that it is through brokenness, blood, and tears—through the body—that the spirit is found, and ignited.

Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She was the 2019 – 2022 Ecotone Postgraduate Fellow at UNC Wilmington and a recent graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University and Georgetown University, where she studied poetry and theology. She is the winner of the 2021 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose from Gulf Coast and has received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Recent poems and essays can be found or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and Kenyon Review, among others.