We’re excited to read your work and appreciate your support of the contest and journal. Your submission will be read soon, with announcements expected early spring. Our judge’s bios are included below.

Meet the Judges

Untitled design

Ruth Madievsky is the author of a poetry collection, “Emergency Brake” (Tavern Books, 2016), winner of the Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series and a Small Press Distribution Top 30 Bestselling Book in any genre of the last several years. Her work appears in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of The Cheburashka Collective, a growing community of women and nonbinary writers whose identity has been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. Originally from Moldova, she currently lives in Boston, where she works as an HIV and oncology pharmacist.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist and screenwriter from Massachusetts. She’s the author of four books, most recently the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her next novel, Death in Her Hands will be published in April.

Ada Calhoun is the author of three nonfiction books: the New York City history St. Marks Is Dead (W.W. Norton, 2015), named a best book of the year by the Boston Globe and Kirkus Reviews; the collection of marriage essays Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give (W.W. Norton, 2017), named one of the top ten memoirs of the year by W; and the Generation X-defining Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis (Grove Atlantic and Audible, 2020). As a freelance reporter, essayist, and critic, she has written for most of the major magazines in the country and many in the U.K., including Cosmopolitan, Glamour, The New Republic, Self, O, National Geographic Traveler, the Times Literary Supplement, andBillboard. For the past fifteen years, she’s been a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review.