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.

2010 JUDGES

POETRY: Erin Belieu
FICTION: Michael Knight
NONFICTION: T.A. Noonan

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