2012 JUDGES
Marilyn Kallet is the author of 15 books, including Packing Light: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2009). Her next book of poems, The Love That Moves Me, was published early in 2013. She has translated Paul Eluard's Last Love Poems and Surrealist Benjamin Pˇret's The Big Game. In 2005, Kallet was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in Poetry. She has won the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Poetry, and has served as a literary arts advisor to the TAC. Recently she judged the state competition for Tennessee Out Loud, co-sponsored by the National Poetry Foundation and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Marilyn Kallet has performed her poetry in theaters and on campuses across the United States, as well as in France, and in Warsaw and Cracow, as a guest of the United States Embassy's "America Presents" program. Recently Garrison Keillor read her poem, "Fireflies," on The Writer's Almanac. Dr. Kallet is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee, where she is also Professor of English. She also teaches poetry workshops for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France.
John McManus was born in Knoxville and grew up in Maryville, Tennessee. He is the author of the novel Bitter Milk (2005) and the short story collections Born on a Train (2003) and Stop Breakin Down (2000), all published by Picador USA. In 2000 he became the youngest-ever winner of the Whiting Writers' Award following the publication of Stop Breakin Down. His fiction and non-fiction have also appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Oxford American, The Harvard Review, StorySouth, Columbia, Paraphilia, and Night Train, as well as the fiction anthologies Surreal South '09, Surreal South '11, and Degrees of Elevation. His writing fellowships and awards include the New Writing Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the James A. Michener fellowship at the University of Texas, where he earned his MFA in 2004. McManus is a professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and he also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Goddard College in Vermont. He is contributing editor for Fiddleblack, a literary journal dedicated to creative writing with a strong sense of place.
Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven; Quakertown; and Break the Skin. He has also published three memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones and Such a Life. His first book was the short story collection, The Least You Need To Know. He is the co-editor of Passing the Word: Writers on Their Mentors. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper's, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he was the winner of the 2006 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
2013 JUDGES
A. E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. Her work appears widely, in such journals as The Atlantic, Parnassus, Poetry, Poetry Review (U.K.), The New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is the recipient of the Poets' Prize for her book, Hapax. Her most recent collection, Olives, was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle award. Her translation work has received a grant from the NEA. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, MacArthur, and United States Artists foundations.
Ayse Papatya Bucak teaches in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Her writing has been published in a variety of journals including Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Fairy Tale Review, Brevity, and Creative Nonfiction. Her short fiction has been selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories anthology and the Pushcart Prize. She was born in Istanbul, Turkey.
Margaret Lazarus Dean holds a BA in anthropology from Wellesley College and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Time It Takes to Fall (Simon & Schuster, 2007), a novel about the space shuttle Challenger disaster. A book of creative nonfiction, Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2014. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville.
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