2016 JUDGES

	Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator. His books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008), and the cross-genre text Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). He has also published a translation of Water's Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri (Omnidawn Press, 2011), Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri (BOA Editions, 2013) and (with Libby Murphy) L'amour by Marguerite Duras (Open Letter Books, 2013). His novels include Quinn's Passage (blazeVox books), named one of "The Best Books of 2005" by Chronogram magazine and The Disappearance of Seth (Etruscan Press, 2009), and his books of essays include Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Fasting for Ramadan (Tupelo Press, 2011). In addition to co-editing Jean Valentine: This-World Company (University of Michigan Press, 2012), he is a contributing editor for AWP Writers Chronicle and associate editor of the literary magazine FIELD and founding editor of the small press Nightboat Books. He is the series co-editor for both Poets on Poetry and Under Discussion, from the University of Michigan Press. He is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College.
	Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Yaddo. She is most recently the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose). Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times Editor's Choice, Chicago Tribune Fall's Best, and 2007 California Book Award winner. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, an NPR Best Book of 2014, and the recipient of many other honors. Her other writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper's, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, The Paris Review Daily, Newyorker.com, and many other magazines and newspapers around the world. In 2017, her first memoir Sick will be published by HarperPerennial. She currently lives in New York City's Harlem and is Writer in Residence at Bard College.
	Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University and is currently a Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division, and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, the UK edition released in 2016. Laymon has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications including Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Colorlines, NPR, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, PEN Journal, Oxford American, The Best American Series, and Guernica. He is a currently a columnist at The Guardian. Kiese Laymon has two books forthcoming, including a memoir called Heavy which will be released in 2016 and the novel called And So On which can be expected in the Spring of 2017, both from Scribner.

2017 JUDGES

	Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. His first book, Slow Lightning, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Corral has also been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. His poems have appeared in Ambit, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He will be a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University in 2017-18. He's an Assistant Professor in the M.F.A. program at North Carolina State University.
	Gabino Iglesias has had work in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Verbicide, Marginalia, The Rumpus, Red Fez, Out of the Gutter, HorrorTalk, and many other print and online venues. He is a columnist for LitReactor, the film/television editor for Entropy Magazine, and the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine. His latest novel, Zero Saints, received a rave review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, will be published in Spain in late 2017, and was optioned for film and nominated for the Wonderland Book Award. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
	Nicole Walker is the author of two forthcoming books, Sustainability: A Love Story and Microcosmology. Her previous books include Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She also edited Bending Genre with Margot Singer. She's nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona where it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July.

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