New Constructions Hybrid Book Contest is WCP’s annual contest, which is dedicated to expanding the language and spirit of the hybrid form. We are especially interested in works that collide or collaborate; works that move across times, languages, histories, that juxtapose and interpolate, to reveal new patterns of reading and seeing.
Winner of the 2025 New Constructions contest: Sights Unseen
Featuring paintings by Linda Larsen and responsive texts from Mildred Barya, Deborah James, Kitty Greene and Dominque Tuttle.
Bringing the truth of imagination to bear on the history of the South, Asheville artist Linda Larsen makes work whose relevance continues to expand.
"In her poem to the diaspora, Gwendolyn Brooks addresses the speaker “you”, setting out for Africa and not knowing that “the Black Continent / that had to be reached / was you.” What Linda Larsen has done in these paintings offers us a connector—a conveyor belt of reeducation, remembering, and reckoning with the history of the Middle Passage. This body of work, SightsUnseen, is a geography of bodies: land, sea, water, shore, shells, and the human body—all coming together—weaving a story that’s both old and fresh. I understand this collaborative work as a reclamation of humanity’s complicated and shared history, filled with departures and no returns, echoing with chains of trauma." - from the Introduction by Mildred Barya
Sights Unseen will be published in the Fall of 2026.
More information on the work of Linda Larsen can be found at https: lindalarsenstudio.com
Winner of the 2026 New Constructions contest: Full Circle
text by Jonathan Weinert and H. L. Hix
From two masterful poets, Full Circle is a hybrid work in form and spirit, a song of multi-valent voices set to the music of the world.
"We’ve called the poem “Full Circle”—a fifty-part sequence in a recurring bipartite form that takes up most of the book—a testament, in honor of its roots in religious thought and literary traditions. But if it’s a testament, it’s a decidedly secular one, full of airplanes and hayfields, flowers and flags, summer nights and autumn days, presences and silences, abandoned storefronts and voluble neighbors, intimations of mortality and what (if anything) might lie beyond it. One aim of the poem is to regard, together, the mystery that the world bestows upon us every day, and to render into beautiful language a portion of its splendor. In short, we attempted to listen." JW & HLH
Full Circle will be published in the Spring of 2027
More information about the poets can be found at jonathanweinert.com & hlhix.com