2024 Contest Judges Announced

Samuel Washington Allen Prize: Enzo Silon Surin

Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born award-winning poet, author, educator, publisher and social advocate. He has taught, performed, and lectured on topics such as social justice, the immigrant experience, and racial disparities. He is the author of American Scapegoat (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) and When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. He is also the author of two chapbooks and co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022). Surin currently serves as Founding Editor & Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.

Amy Lowell Prize: Sarah Audsley

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She is the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

Diana Der Hovanessian Prize: George Kalogeris

Portrait of George Kalogeris.

George Kalogeris’s most recent book of poems is Winthropos, (Louisiana State University, 2021). He is also the author of Guide to Greece (LSU), a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos, and poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets. His poems and translations have been anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010). He is the winner of the James Dickey Poetry Prize, the Stephen J. Meringoff Award, and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize.

E.E. Cummings Prize: Marcia Karp

Marcia Karp has poems and translations in journals and anthologies in England and America, including The Times Literary Supplement; Agenda; The Guardian; Partisan Review; Harvard ReviewPloughshares; Catullus in English and Petrarch in English (Penguin Books); The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (Norton); and Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 (Waywiser). Her collection, If by Song (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2021), was a finalist for the NEPC’s Motton Book prize. She has published literary and bibliographical criticism and history in a variety of journals. She taught literary and editorial matters at Boston University after earning graduate degrees there.

Jean Pedrick Prize:  Jennifer Jean

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. She’s co-written and co-translated the forthcoming collaborative and bilingual collection Where Do You Live? (Arrowsmith Press, 2025) with Iraqi poet Hanaa Ahmed. As well, she’s edited the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press, 2025). Her poetry, prose, and co-translations appear in POETRY Magazine, Rattle Magazine, The Common, Los Angeles Review, Terrain, and On the Seawall. She’s received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Academy of American Poets, the Mass Cultural Council, DISQUIET, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program. For more information, visit: wwwjenniferjeanwriter.com