2008 JUDGES
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux's fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake (1990) What We Carry (1994) Smoke (2000) and Superman: The Chapbook (2008). Co-author of The Poet's Companion, she's the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The NEA and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and many others. She taught for 15 years at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, at Pacific University's Low-Residency MFA Program. She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, recently moved to Raleigh where she joins the faculty at North Carolina State University.
Andy Mozina has published stories in Tin House, The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has been named a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2005 and mentioned in Pushcart Prize 2006 and 2008. His story collection, The Women Were Leaving the Men, won the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for fiction. He teaches literature and creative writing at Kalamazoo College.
2009 JUDGES
Patricia Smith is a 2008 National Book Award finalist for Blood Dazzler, which chronicles the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Her other books include Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award; Close to Death; Big Towns, Big Talk and Life According to Motown. She also authored the ground-breaking history Africans in America and the award-winning children's book Janna and the Kings. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and many other journals, and has been performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam's Poetry International, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history.
Kim Chinquee, recipient of the Pushcart and Henfield prizes, is author of Oh Baby (Ravenna Press), the forthcoming Pretty (White Pine Press) and is co-editor of the anthology Online Writing 1996-2006: Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press). She lives in Buffalo, New York.
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