2015 Summer Contest Judges

We are excited to announce the 2015 Blue Mesa Review Summer Contest judges! Also, we are adding Nonfiction to the contest this year! Get those poems, stories, and essays ready summer contest seekers, because we want to publish you! And so without further delay, please welcome our judges.

 

We are excited to say that our Fiction judge is Antonya Nelson.  She’s the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (Bloomsbury, 2014).  Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

Our Poetry judge for this year’s contest is Julie Carr. She’s the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013), and the co-editor of Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, forthcoming from University of Alabama Press (2015). Her co-translations of Apollinaire and contemporary French poet, Leslie Kaplan have been published in Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere and a chapbook of selections from Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory has recently been released by Commune Editions. Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow and is an associate professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder where she teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance Ph.D. program. She regularly collaborated with dance artist K.J. Holmes. She lives in Denver and helps to run Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery.

Judging Nonfiction is the wonderful Wendy C. Ortiz. She’s authored Excavation: A Memoir and the forthcoming book Hollywood Notebook on Writ Large Press. You can click here to pre-order Hollywood Notebook. Wendy wrote the year-long, monthly column “On the Trail of Mary Jane” about medical marijuana dispensary culture in Southern California for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Hazlitt, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus and Brain, Child magazine, among many other journals. She is a parent and registered marriage and family therapist intern in Los Angeles. You can head to wendyortiz.com to learn more about our Nonfiction judge!

 

The contest opens June 1st and will close on August 31st. For more information on the contest guidelines and prizes, please click here.

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