Gold Line Press

Gold Line Press seeks to promote the work of emerging writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as

Created by a group of graduate students in 2010, Gold Line Press aims to promote the work of emerging poets and fiction writers, as well as to elevate the chapbook form. The Gold Line Press editorial board does not adhere to any specific aesthetic approach. We seek out voices that deserve to be heard by a larger audience, whether those voices speak in formal or experimental verse and prose. Our ch

apbooks are created with the intention of producing an elegant, perfect-bound book that is also an art object. Overall, our goal is to showcase exceptional emerging writers and reward them not only with publication, but also with broad distribution of their work to reviewers and bloggers. While most chapbooks have received only limited exposure in the past, our aim is to make the chapbook a more relevant medium and a truly useful tool for new writers who want to bring their work to a broader audience.

03/05/2026

Come join us at our AWP off-site event tomorrow (Mar. 6) from 5-6 pm at Mystique Barrel Brewing (912 Washington Blvd)!

Featuring readings from AISHVARYA ARORA, HENRY GOLDKAMP & ADRIE ROSE.

02/26/2026

Cover Reveal!

Winner of the 2024 Fiction Gold Line Press Chapbook Contest, Scrolls for Blue Bottle Trees by Sarah Cheshire.

About the collection: Told in lyrical vignettes and other inventive shapes, Scrolls for BlueBottle Trees is a piercing contemplation on mothers and mother figures, physical architecture and the architecture of belief, myth and the different iterations of family. With imagery that takes wonderful and startling turns, reading this felt like being swept up inside a language I didn’t know I understood. I lingered on every page.
—‘Pemi Aguda, author of Ghostroots

About the author: Sarah Cheshire is a hybrid writer, teacher, and creative collaborator based in Alabama. Her first chapbook, Unravelings, was published in 2017 as the winner of the Etchings Press Chapbook Prose Contest. She has had essays, poems, and reviews published in Fairy Tale Review, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Scalawag Magazine, River Teeth, Brevity, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, among others. In 2018, she was awarded AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Creative Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Disquiet International Prize.

Cover art by

02/25/2026

Cover Reveal!

Winner of the 2024 Poetry Gold Line Press Chapbook Contest, Mr. Time by Aishvarya Arora.

About the collection: “My birth / isn’t my only origin,” writes Aishvarya Arora in this sharp and tender collection. Keenly attentive to sound, Arora makes words sing and singe within the compressed spaces of sonnets and tightly-clipped couplets. Restless, words and bodies glint in the light and take on new meanings, enacting the belief in the possibility of change required by both gender transition and grief. Arora is an exciting new voice that writes with equal parts control and imagination, “invention / & inheritance.” -Franny Choi, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

About the author: Aishvarya Arora is a poet, teaching artist, and cultural organizer from Queens, New York. Their writing has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and Foglifter, among other publications. Currently, they live in Ithaca, New York, where they create zines and broadsides through their micro-press, Lavender Codex.

Cover artist and headshot 📸 credit to Esther Kondo Heller

02/23/2026

Cover Reveal!

Winner of the 2024 Gold Line Press Editor’s Prize, Burma Girl by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu.

About the collection: Across lyric brilliance, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s voice emerges as the very thing poets need today. Burma Girl is the necessary speaking back to the colonizer’s gaze, fighting exoticization through the musical power of stanzaic arguments and echoes. Created under the imperial Orientalist lens, Rudyard Kipling’s Burma Girl never had agency, because as Tu writes, “There is no place for me in the Western canon.” In a response that I feel so deep in my bones, this must-read poet forms a collection that completely eschews the “colonial brand of desire.” After all, we never asked for the colonizer’s gaze to begin with.
—Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme

About the author: Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar, and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Cover art credit to and headshot 📸 credit to

02/19/2026

Cover Reveal!

Winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Gold Line Press Chapbook Contest, Saliendo Adelante by José Rios

About the collection: José Rios’s writing is surprising with emotion, vulnerability, and tenderness. In the essays that make up Saliendo Adelante we have a narrator who sees the world with curiosity, who shows us characters that are flawed and real. With humor and grace, Rios defies heteronormative expectations, charming us, making us laugh, breaking our hearts.
—Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls

About the author: JOSÉ RIOS is a poet and educator living in the hills above the high desert of Palmdale, California. His poems are found in Catamaran and San Pedro River Review. He’s been part of two exorcisms, the longtime host of Southern California’s only biweekly birdless cockfight, and the last person to have seen the Taco Bell Chihuahua alive.

11/04/2025

Laura Distelheim (chosen by Viet Thanh Nguyen as the winner of our 2016 Fiction Chapbook Competition) is partnering with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights ( )to provide a free copy of her prizewinning chapbook “We” to the first 200 people who make a donation of at least $25, with 100% of that donation going to ICIRR.

check out the link in our bio for more!

10/14/2025

Tomorrow is the last day to submit for the chapbook contests! Get those manuscripts in NOW!

09/30/2025

Surprise surprise! has extended its Chapbook Contest deadline to October 15th! Get those manuscripts ready and send them in!

09/25/2025

Less than one week to submit to the Chapbook Contest! Get those submissions in by September 30th at midnight! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

08/15/2025

Writers, submissions are now open for the 2025 Chapbook Contest! Send us your fiction, poetry, and nonfiction chapbooks starting today until September 30th!

Info on how to submit can be found at the link in our bio.

Thank you to our incredible guest judges & & !!

08/07/2025

We’re thrilled to announce that our poetry judge for this year’s chapbook contest is Claire Hong! ( )

Claire Hong is the author of Upend (Noemi Press). She received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and has creative writing degrees from the University of Arizona (MFA) and Pratt Institute (BFA). She was born in San Francisco, CA and currently lives in Tucson, AZ where she teaches writing at Pima Community College.

08/06/2025

We’re thrilled to announce that our fiction judge for this year’s chapbook contest is Jenny Tinghui Zhang! ( )

Jenny Tinghui Zhang is the author of the novels Superfan and Four Treasures of the Sky, named an Idaho Book of the Year and short- and longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has appeared in The Cut, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Texas Highways, and elsewhere. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and has received support from Yaddo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Tin House, and the University of Wyoming, where she completed her MFA.

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