2015 Contest Judges: Natalie Diaz and Amber Sparks
Dear friends,
We're delighted to announce the judges for this year's poetry chapbook contest and our inaugural prose chapbook contest: Natalie Diaz and Amber Sparks. Contest submissions will be open from March 1 through May 15, 2015; you can view the contest guidelines here.
Poetry Judge: Natalie Diaz Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Her second book will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. She is a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellow and a 2012 Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. In 2104, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship, both from Princeton University, a Civatella Ranieri Foundation Residency, and a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program and lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.
Prose Judge: Amber Sparks Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novella The Desert Places. Her second short story collection, The Unfinished World and Other Stories, will be published by Liveright in 2016. You can follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle, or at ambernoellesparks.com.
