Broken Houses

Winner of the 2026 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father's placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure. At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.