Poetry Judge

Karen Schubert

Karen Schubert is the author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing) and five chapbooks including Dear Youngstown (Nightballet Press) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State University Press), winner of a Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Prize. Her poetry was recently performed at the Cleveland Humanities Festival and published in the Edith Chase Symposium anthology Songs for Wild Ohio, The Pinch, and Ohio Poetry Association’s anthologies Common Threads and Ides of March. Her awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is Founding Director of Lit Youngstown.

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Fiction Judge

Katrina Denza

Katrina Denza’s stories can be found in REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, The Jabberwock Review, The Emerson Review, Storyglossia, New Delta Review; The MacGuffin, Confrontation, Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, Word Riot, elimae, wigleaf, Pank, and Gargoyle #57, among others. In 2011, Katrina was awarded the Carol Houck Smith Contributor Scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Currently, she’s working on a collection of stories and a novel.

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Nonfiction Judge

Dr. George H. Jensen

Dr. George H. Jensen is Professor Emeritus with the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he taught courses in memoir and the personal essay. His recent books include Some of the Words Are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family (2000), Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis (2000), and Identities Across Texts (2002). The Ethics of Nonfiction is forthcoming with Palgrave Press. With Heidi Skurat Harris, he has written Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty, which is forthcoming with Routledge Press. He retired in May 2023 and now lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

 

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