2014 JUDGES
Kathy Fagan's fifth collection of poems, Sycamore, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2016. Winner of the National Poetry Series and Vassar Miller prizes, she has received grants from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council, and her work has appeared in venues such as FIELD, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Fagan teaches in the MFA Program at Ohio State, where she also serves as Series Editor of the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Poetry Prize.
Lily Hoang is the author of four books, including Changing, recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. With Blake Butler, she edited 30 Under 30, and with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she is editing the forthcoming anthology The Force of What's Possible: Writers on the Avant-Garde and Accessibility. She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she is Associate Department Head, and she serves as Prose Editor for Puerto del Sol.
Michael Martone's most recent book of essays is Racing in Place. The Flatness and Other Landscapes was the winner of the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize. He has authored a dozen books of short fiction and edited several collections short prose including The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. He currently teaches at the University of Alabama and has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, and Warren Wilson College.
2015 JUDGES
Bruce Bond is the author of fourteen books including five forthcoming: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.
Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He is the author of three full-length collections, So You Know It's Me (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011), a series of Craigslist Missed Connections, Leave Luck to Heaven (Uncanny Valley Press, 2014), an ode to 8-bit video games, & Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping (Cobalt Press, 2015). essays on NBA Jam. i/o (Civil Coping Mechanisms), a memoir in the form of a computer virus, is forthcoming in 2015. His works in progress deal with professional wrestling and long distance running (not at once).
Kate Schmitt's Singing Bones won the 2013 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. A writer and visual artist, Kate Schmitt has an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, including Earth Shattering Poems (Holt, 1998), Light Gathering Poems (Holt, 2000), I Just Hope It's Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), as well as the literary journals Paradigm, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature. She was a nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast and served on the journal's Board of Directors in 2008-2009. She has also edited and written for the companion website to a pilot television series created by Shelley Duvall, a wind energy company, and most recently for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her courses include nonfiction and poetry workshops, 20th-century literature, young adult literature, and Chinese literature in translation.
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