2022 Category Judges
Student entries are read by the faculty of the Creative Writing program, who select a group of eight to twelve finalists in each category. The work of these finalists is then sent onward to a group of outside judges, who decide first, second and third place winners in their respective categories. All judging is anonymous.
This year’s outside judges are:
Single Poem. Alicia Mountain is the author of High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy to win the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Four in Hand (BOA Editions, forthcoming early 2023) and the chapbook Thin Fire (BOAAT Press), selected by Natalie Diaz. Doctor Mountain was a Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver and the 2020-21 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is a lesbian poet, based in New York City, where she teaches at Columbia University and in the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s College. She is a contributing editor at the Keyon Review.
Group of Poems. Glenn North is the author of City of Song, a collection of poems inspired by Kansas City’s rich jazz tradition and the triumphs and tragedies of the African American experience. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a Callaloo creative writing fellow, and a recipient of the Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Award. His work has appeared in the Langston Hughes Review, Caper Literary Journal, Platte Valley Review, New Letters, KC Studio, Cave Canem Anthology XII, The African American Review and American Studies Journal. His ekphrastic and visual poems have appeared in art exhibitions at the American Jazz Museum, the Leedy-Volkos Art Center, the Bunker Center for the Arts, the Portfolio Gallery (St. Louis), the Greenlease Gallery, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He is currently filling his appointment as the poet laureate of Kansas City's 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Fiction. X.C. Atkins is the author of Grace Street Alley and Other Stories, published by Makeout Creek Books in 2018. His second collection, The Desperado Days, is forthcoming in 2022 with Trnsfr Books. Additionally, he has short stories in Prairie Schooner, Paper Darts, The Poydras Review, Akashic Books’ Richmond Noir, and other journals and anthologies. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University. He lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Creative Nonfiction. Jung Hae Chae's poetry and nonfiction have appeared in AGNI, Calyx Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Third Coast, Guernica Magazine, New England Review and others. Her honors include the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Prize in Nonfiction, the Crazyhorse Prize in Nonfiction, and the Pushcart Prize.
Drama + Screenwriting. Nate Waggoner is a writer, cartoonist and educator living in Richmond, Virginia. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Peach Mag, The Hard Times and elsewhere. He runs The Magic Writing Workshop on Zoom and is currently working on a graphic novel.
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