We are excited to announce our judges for our upcoming nonfiction and fiction contests.

The Fourth Annual Nonfiction Contest will be judged by Brian Blanchfield. He is the author of three books of prose and poetry, including Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, a book of nonfiction that is part cultural close reading, part autobiographical reckoning. The recipient of book awards and artist grants from The Whiting Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Howard Foundation, his poems and essays have appeared recently in The Oxford American, Harper’s, BOMB, Brick, and the Wesleyan anthology American Poets in the 21st Century. He teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives with his partner, the poet John Myers, in Moscow, Idaho..

Our judge for the Seventh Annual Fiction Contest is Nafissa Thompson-Spires. She is the author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People, which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, East Bay Review, Compose, Blinders, FLOW, The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She is a 2016 fellow of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop and an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois.

Contest entry windows are:

Nonfiction – November 9 through January 12

Fiction – December 17 through February 17

with general fiction submissions open November 1 through December 15.