Laura Candler is the 2026 Chapbook Competition winner—a collaboration between The Poets Corner, Toad Hall Editions, and the Camden Festival of Poetry.

Common Name, by Laura Candler, is a collection of lyric poems exploring motherhood, identity, and the greater than human world. Candler devotes poems to single species like the Tennessee Cave Salamander and American Persimmon, while also marveling at the humorous language of her children and their fleeting youth. She moves between handmade quilts to the backyard flower garden to the ecosystem of the South Cumberland Plateau, all with an ear toward what sparks wonder. With seriousness and play, tenderness and urgency, this collection interrogates what it means to both assert and accept a sense of self during a time of personal and ecological transformation.

“These poems keep turning toward the world—toward the child’s voice, the river’s body, the small, bright pop of a flower—and in that turning, they make a place where wonder and worry can stand side by side without shame. They remind us that close attention is its own kind of devotion, that to name what is fragile, fleeting, and alive means to love it more fully.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil,
poet, essayist and 2026 Chapbook contest judge

We are currently taking pre-orders, the book will be published in September 2026.