Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition Results

Katie Hale is a novelist and poet, based in Cumbria. She won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of two novels: The Edge of Solitude and My Name is Monster. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Northern Writers’ Award, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. She has held Writer in Residence positions in numerous countries, including Australia, the US and Svalbard. Katie also mentors young writers through Writing Squad.

Róisín Leggett Bohan is a writer from Cork. In 2025, she was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and was longlisted for the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition. Her work features in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Manchester Review, Dedalus Press, and was showcased on RTÉ Radio 1. She is the co-founder of HOWL New Irish Writing, holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC, and is a grateful recipient of an Arts Council Literature Bursary and Cork City Council Artist Bursaries.

Stephen Beechinor is from Cork. Recent work in Southword, The Dublin Review, Propel and Local Wonders.

Anna Bowles is a freelance editor and activist who divides her time between London and Ukraine. She began writing poetry in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and her work has been published in Magma, Orbis, The Four-Faced Liar, Poetry Salzburg and others, as well as placing in a number of UK competitions. Her debut pamphlet, Landscape with Mines, will be published on 2 December. She blogs at annabowles.substack.com.

Daragh Byrne is a Sydney-based Irish poet. His work has appeared in Southword, Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Review, Banshee, Howl New Irish Writing, Cyphers,Crannóg, The Waxed Lemon, The Four Faced Liar, Stony Thursday Book and elsewhere. He has been shortlisted or commended in the Patrick Kavanagh award, Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, Poetry London competitions (pamphlet and single poem) and the Listowel Writer’s Week Collection Competition. He is founding editor of The Marrow, a journal of international poetry. themarrowpoetry.com

Darla Himeles (they/them) is an American poet and an assistant teaching professor at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. They are the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough and the full-length poetry collection Cleave, both published by Get Fresh Books. Their poems and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and can be read in recent issues of Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, Honey Literary, and American Poetry Review. They hold an AB in English from Bryn Mawr College, an MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University, and a PhD in American literature from Temple University. You can find Darla on Instagram and YouTube @darlahimelespoetry, and read more at darlahimelespoetry.com.

Lucy Holme is a PhD student at University College Cork. Her work features in PN Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, Southword, Banshee and The Stinging Fly amongst others. She has been shortlisted for numerous international poetry competitions and won the Southword Editor’s Award and the Cúirt New Writing Prize for Poetry 2024. Her debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis, (Broken Sleep Books 2022) was shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award. A nonfiction essay collection, Blue Diagonals, was published in September 2024. She is currently working on her first novel and full poetry collection.

Kim Curts Mattheussens studied German and English literature at Ball State University, the Katholische Universität Eichstätt and Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität Münster, and creative writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. She is an alum of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon. Her poem, “Etude no. 1″ was shortlisted for the 2022 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in Southword, The Common, and ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Leah C. Stetson is a poet from the coast of Maine, US. She’s an Interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at University of Maine (US) and a Visiting Research Scholar at UCC in Cork, Ireland. Her poetry has appeared in the Fish Anthology twice as a past-honoree of the Fish Poetry Prize (Fish Publishing, 2019 & 2020), selected by Billy Collins, as well as issues of Arsenic Lobster, Off the Coast Literary Journal, Boned, Flora Fiction, Omphalos, and Wicked Alice. Leah lives in West Cork with her cat, Edna, named after Edna O’Brien and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She has performed her poetry as part of the West Cork Literary Festival. Find her on IG @RomanticEcologist or her blog, StrangeWetlands.com.