Best of the Net 2019  



2019 JUDGES

Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, she is the author of three chapbooks and founder/editor-in-chief of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. Her poems and translations are published in New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. Eloisa lives in Columbus, OH and is the founder of Costura Creative.
Megan Giddings is a fiction editor at The Offing and a features editor at The Rumpus. She's been included in the 2014 and 2018 Best of the Net anthologies. Her short stories are forthcoming or have been recently published in Catapult, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Megan's debut novel, Lakewood, will be published by Amistad in 2020. More about her can be found at megangiddings.com.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.


2020 JUDGES

Jasminne Mendez is an award-winning author, playwright, poet, performer, and educator. Mendez has been published both nationally and internationally in literary journals and anthologies including The New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, and others. Her first multi-genre memoir Island of Dreams (Floricanto Press, 2013) was awarded Best Young Adult Latino Focused Book by the International Latino Book Awards in 2015 and her second book Night-Blooming Jasminne: Personal Essays & Poetry (Arte Publico Press) was released in May 2018. Her debut children’s book Josefina’s Habichuelas is forthcoming with Piñata Books an imprint of Arte Público Press in 2021.

She is the Co-Founder and Program Director of the Houston-based Latinx literary arts organization Tintero Projects and a co-host to the poetry and writing podcast series InkWell a collaboration between Tintero Projects and Inprint Houston. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writer’s Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and she is a Canto Mundo Fellow, a Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow and a Macondo and VONA alumni. She lives and works in Houston, TX.
Matthew Salesses is the author of three novels, most recently Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear.
Sarah Einstein teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is the author of Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press, 2015) and Remnants of Passion (SheBooks, 2014). Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Sun, Ninth Letter, PANK, and other journals. Her work has been reprinted in the Best of the Net and awarded a Pushcart Prize and the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

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