We are honored to have these fantastic guest judges to help us select the winners of Long Story Short Award 2020...
The Short Fiction Jury:
Nic Brown
Nic Brown is the author of the novels In Every Way, Doubles, and the story collection Floodmarkers, which was selected as an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Glimmer Train, Epoch, and the Harvard Review, among many other publications. His work has been anthologized in several collections, including Best Food Writing 2015 and The New York Times-bestseller Good Dog. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University, Brown has been the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and is currently an associate professor of Creative Writing at Clemson University.
Kurt Bachard
A Pushcart Prize nominee, Kurt Bachard is a widely published writer from South London, UK. His fiction has been published by Dell (in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine), Claren Books, Comet press, Flametree books, among many others
Erin Kirsh
Erin Kirsh is a writer and performer based in Vancouver, Canada. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in dozens of lit journals including The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, EVENT, QWERTY, and Geist, where she took second place in their postcard short story contest. Visit her at www.erinkirsh.com or follow her on twitter @kirshwords
Andrew Stancek
Andrew Stancek describes his vocation as dreaming – clutching onto hope, even in turbulent times. He has been published widely, in SmokeLong Quarterly, FRiGG, Green Mountains Review, New World Writing, New Flash Fiction Review, Jellyfish Review and Peacock Journal, among others. He continues to be astonished.
The Creative Nonfiction Jury:
Diana Spechler
Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who By Fire and Skinny and of the New York Times Opinion series Going Off. She has written for The Guardian, GQ, Washington Post, Esquire, New York, Paris Review Daily, The Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train Stories, Harper’s, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Boston Globe, National Geographic Traveler, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House Open Bar, BBC Travel, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Ploughshares, and many other publications. She is also a seven-time Moth StorySLAM winner. Her awards and honors include the Orlando Nonfiction Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation, a Yaddo residency, and a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University. She teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Online Writers’ Studio and the low-residency MFA program at Cedar Crest College.
Nathan Alling Long
Nathan is the author of a collection of fifty short fictions, The Origin of Doubt, a Lambda Award finalist. His stories and essays have appeared in over 100 publications. He's received a Truman Capote grant, a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and scholarships to Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences. He teaches at Stockton University and lives in Philadelphia. Find out more here.
P.F. Potvin
P.F. Potvin is not a household appliance. He is a Michigan-born writer, teacher, and ultramarathon runner whose writing has appeared in Boston Review, PBS NewsHour, PANK, MiPOesias, Passages North, Sentence, Sleeping Fish, An Introduction to the Prose Poem Anthology, Poets & Artists magazine, and elsewhere. Potvin is the author of The Attention Lesson (No Tell Books). He has served on the staff of the literary journal Drunken Boat and currently reviews for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He has been a visiting writer at Emory University and the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He holds an MFA from Bennington College, where he received the Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship. He has since taught in Chile and the USA and has received residency scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and Casa Libre in la Solana. He chairs the Writing Awards, serves as the faculty advisor for the Lyceum literary journal, and teaches in the Writing Program and Honors Program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Spy him at pfpotvin.com.
The Poetry Jury:
Kate Angus
Kate Angus is a founding editor of Augury Books. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic online’s “Object Lessons” series, The Washington Post, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” newsletter, Best New Poets 2010, Best New Poets 2014, and other places. She has received the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s “Orlando” prize, as well as awards from Southeast Review, American Literary Review, and The New York Times’ “Teacher Who Made a Difference” award. Kate is the Chair of the Advisory Board for the Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities and founded the “Pen and Brush Presents” reading series for the visual and literary arts nonprofit Pen and Brush. She has received residencies from Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan; the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation in Sozopol and Sofia, Bulgaria; the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room in South Beach, Florida; the Wildfjords trail in Westfjords, Iceland; and the BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy. Kate has a BA from Brown University, an MFA from The New School University, and has done additional studies at Yale University, Barnard College, Columbia University and Trinity College, Dublin. Born and raised in Michigan, she currently lives in New York.
R. A. Allen
R. A. Allen’s poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, RHINO Poetry, The Penn Review, Gargoyle, Amuse-Bouche, Glassworks, JAMA, Amaryllis[Poetry Swindon], and elsewhere. His fiction has been published in The Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2010, among others. He has a Pushcart nomination for poetry and one Best of the Web nomination for fiction. He lives in Memphis and was born on the same day that the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism: December 26th. Find out more here.
Mark J. Mitchell
Mark J. Mitchell was born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. He has published four full-length collections of poetry and several chapbooks. His most recent collection is “Roshi San Francisco” from Norfolk Press.. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster, where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, like everyone else, he’s unemployed. He has published two novels and three chapbooks and two full length collections so far. Titles on request. A meager online presence can be found here.