Judges Announced for NEPC Contest

SAMUEL WASHINGTON ALLEN PRIZE for a long poem or poem sequence

Charles Coe is a poet, writer, and musician. He sings jazz and plays
and teaches the didgeridoo. He’s written three books of poetry and one of fiction, and teaches in the MFA writing programs at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI and Bay Path University in Longmeadow, MA. He’s long-time co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union for freelance writers and editors.

E. E. CUMMINGS PRIZE for a compelling, lyrical, or experimental poem of no more than 21 lines

Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. She is also the author of two
chapbooks, Mirror Factory and Dearling, and her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Her awards include the 2021 E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, where she now serves as editor.

AMY LOWELL PRIZE for an outstanding poem by a poet with strong ties to New England

Moira Linehan is the author of four collections of poetry. Her first two, If
No Moon
(2007) and Incarnate Grace (2015), were published by Southern
Illinois University Press. Both were named Honor Books in Poetry in the
Massachusetts Book Awards. In 2020 Slant Books brought out her third
collection Toward and Dos Madres Press published her fourth, &
Company
. She lives in Reading, MA.

DER-HOVANESSIAN PRIZE for a translation from any language

Eric Hyett is a poet, writer and translator from Brookline, Massachusetts, USA. Eric’s poetry appears in magazines and journals, recently the Worcester Review, Cincinnati Review, Barrow Street, the Hudson Review and Harvard Review Online. With Spencer Thurlow, Eric co-translated Sonic Peace by Kiriu Minashita, (Phoneme Media, 2017), which was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s 2018 National Translation Award, as well as the Lucien Stryk Prize for Asian Translation.

JEAN PEDRICK CHAPBOOK PRIZE for a chapbook of poems published in the last two years

Shanta Lee Gander is an artist who works in different mediums as a photographer, writer across genres and is a public intellectual whose work has been featured in The Massachusetts Review, PRISM, ITERANT Literary Magazine, Palette Poetry, BLAVITY, DAME Magazine, and The Crisis Magazine, Rebelle Society. In addition to teaching a Media Studies course at The Putney School, Shanta Lee is one of the writers for the Ms. Magazine Blog, a regular contributor to Art New England and is a producer and reporter for Vermont Public Radio. She has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College.

SHEILA MARGARET MOTTON BOOK PRIZE for a book of poems published in the last two years

The NEPC Board will serve collectively as judge for this prize.