JENNIFER MAIER's first book of poems, Dark Alphabet
(Southern Illinois UP), won the Crab Orchard Review Series
in Poetry first book award and was named one of "Ten
Remarkable Books of 2006" by The Academy of American
Poets.  She is an associate professor of English at Seattle
Pacific University and an editor for IMAGE, a quarterly arts
journal.

Poetry Judge
MARY JO SALTER is the author of five poetry
collections, including Open Shutters, a New York
Times Notable Book of the Year, and she has coedited,
with Margaret Ferguson and Jon Stallworthy, the fourth
and fifth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 
She is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer at Mount
Holyoke College and lives in Amherst, Mass.

BEVERLY BLASINGAME has won a fellowship from
Mississippi Arts Commission for creative nonfiction and
a John Woods Scholarship from Prague Summer
Program for Fiction.   She was selected to showcase her
writing on an adjudicated site, SouthernArtistry.org,
managed by Southern Arts Federation.  She has worked
as a writer-in-residence for a literacy program in
Mississippi and as a creative writing teacher for
Communities in the Schools at a site impacted by
Hurricane Katrina.

Essay Judge
GERALD EARLY is the author of One Nation Under
a Groove: Motown and American Culture, and The
Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting,
Literature and Modern American Culture, winner of
a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. 
He also was a consultant on Ken Burns' documentary
films on baseball and on jazz.  He is Merle Kling
Professor of Modern Letters and director of The
Center for the Humanities at Washington University
                              in St. Louis.

SARA PRITCHARD is the author of Crackpots (2003) and
Lately (2007), both linked-story collections.  She teaches
in the Wilkes Univeresity Low-Residency MA/MFA
Creative Writing Program in Wilkes-Barre, Penn.  She
lives in Morgantown, W.V., with her husband, author
Kevin Oderman, and their dogs, Brownie and Officer
Guggenheim.  Sara is also a full-time worker bee for the
West Virginia University Press

Fiction Judge  RISHI REDDI is the author of
Karma and Other Stories, and her work has been
included in the Best American Short Stories series. 
Born in Hyderabad, India, and raised in Great Britain
and the U.S., she also is an environmental attorney
for the state of Massachusetts.