2014 Literary Contest Judges

A Special Thanks to Our Novel Contest and Short Works Contest Judges!

The Novel Contest and Short Works Contests are annual fixtures at the MWA. These contests draw hundreds of entries from around the world. Judging is based on real-world criteria that agents and editors would look for in a piece. Monetary awards and other prizes are given to first through third place winners.

The Maryland Writers' Association thanks the following judges (in no particular order) for volunteering their time to assist with this year's contest. The 2014 Contest cannot happen without them. If you choose to work with any of these professionals, be sure to let them know that you found them on this website.

Final Judges:

Born and raised in Baltimore, Dean Bartoli Smith is the author of NEVER EASY, NEVER PRETTY: A Fan. A City. A Championship Season (Temple University Press, 2013) and a contributor to the 2nd Edition of Ted Patterson's FOOTBALL IN BALTIMORE (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). His poetry has appeared in Poetry East, Open City, Beltway, The Pearl, The Charlotte Review, Gulf Stream, and upstreet among others. His book of poems, American Boy, won the 2000 Washington Writer’s Prize and was also awarded the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001 for the best book published by a Maryland writer over the past three years. He writes sports for Press Box and Baltimore Brew. He attended Loyola High School and graduated from Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois. He majored in English at the University of Virginia and received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. He is director of Project MUSE at The Johns Hopkins University, a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community.

Susan Muaddi Darraj graduated from Rutgers University with a Master's degree in English Literature. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College. Susan is the author if The Inheritance of Exile.  Her new book,  A Curious Land, won the 2014 AWP Grace Paley Award for fiction and will be published in 2015.She is currently an editor for Barrelhouse Magazine, and along with Dave Housley and Julie Wakeman-Linn, she co-founded the annual Conversations & Connections Conference in Washington DC. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, such as Mizna, New York Stories, Banipal, Calyx, Little Patuxent Review, Solstice, and elsewhere.

Ned Balbo’s third book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press, 2010), received the 2012 Poets’ Prize, and the 2010 Donald Justice Prize. Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and a ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal. Galileo’s Banquet (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1998) shared the Towson University Prize for Literature. He has received the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, and he is co-winner of the 2013 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. His poetry, prose, and translations are out or forthcoming in Able Muse, Beltway Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, Hopkins Review, Iowa Review, River Styx, and more. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, poet-essayist Jane Satterfield.

Secondary Judges:

Dominique Cahn was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and moved to New York City when she was six years old. Raised on New York City’s Upper Westside, she uses fiction to explore issues of immigrant identity. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and a Masters in Public Health from Yale University. She has 15 years of work experience in international health and in government relations and health care policy. She has travelled extensively in the former Soviet Union and lived in Kazakhstan for two years. She serves as reader for the Little Patuxent Review. She currently resides in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband and two daughters.

Brandi Dawn Henderson is a traveling writer, on regular journeys that prove truths to be no strangers to fictions. She co-created and edited Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine, a resource dedicated to promoting cross-cultural understanding through global storytelling. She wrote a relatively successful expat column and an utter failure of an advice column for a year in New Delhi, is the editor of the travel anthologies Whereabouts: Stepping Out of Place (2Leaf Press) and (T)here: Writings on Returnings (Martlet & Mare Books), and has had work published in a variety of journals. She now resides near Portland with a red-bearded outdoorsman and two dogs, Lola and Cormac McArfy. www.outsideinmagazine.com

Shenan Prestwich is a writer, poet, editor, and Washington, DC native recently transplanted to Portland, OR. Publishing in a wide variety of venues both in print and online, Shenan holds a Master of Arts degree in writing (with a concentration in poetry) from Johns Hopkins University and her first full-length collection of poetry, In the Wake, was recently released from White Violet Press. She has served in an editorial capacity for publications such as Magic Lantern Review, Outside In Literary and Travel Magazine, and Prompt & Circumstance. You can follow her at http://shenanprestwich.com.

Emily Rich is the non-fiction editor of Little Patuxent Review. She writes mainly memoir and essay. Her work has been published in a number of small presses including Little Patuxent Review, Welter, River Poet's Journal, Delmarva Review, the Pinch and r.kv.r.y. Her story "On the Road to Human Rights Day"was a notable entrant in the 2014 edition of The Best American Essays.

Lynn Stansbury is a fiction writer, community medicine physician, and medical writer and editor. She served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala in the Vietnam War era, finished a BA in art history in 1970, helped start community clinics in California, then went on to public health and medical training in Hawaii. She has worked in the gyppo logging communities of Montana, in American Samoa, among the Oglala Sioux of North Dakota,
for the Colorado Black Lung Program, and, back in California again, in clinics for Spanish-speaking farm workers. After the Army transferred their family to the DC area in 1993, she spent eleven years at the NIH before joining the research group at Maryland Shock Trauma. She finished the Hopkins MA in Fiction Writing in 2010, and is working on another novel as her thesis work for her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Pat Valdata is a Cecil County writer with an MFA in writing from Goddard College. Her poetry publications include the book Inherent Vice, published by Pecan Grove Press in 2011, and a chapbook Looking for Bivalve, which was a Pecan Grove Press contest finalist in 2002. Pat has twice received Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council for her poetry. In 2013 she was awarded a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation for a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Thanks to this grant and residency, she completed the manuscript for a forthcoming book of poetry that was awarded the 2015 Donald Justice Prize. Pat has taught writing and literature for the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) since 2007.