Contests

One of LitHub’s Poetry Books to Read in 2024, poems from Coachella Elegy have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. Christian Gullette is the recipient of a 2022 Bread Loaf scholarship. Christian works as a Swedish-to-English translator, and he’ll be a faculty member for the 2024 Kenyon Review Online Translation Workshop. Christian also serves as the editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review. He lives in San Francisco with his husband Michael.

Steve Bellin-Oka’s first book of poems, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and was published in 2020 by the University of North Texas Press. He is also the author of four chapbooks, including Tell Me Exactly What You Saw and What You Think It Means, winner of the 2020 Blue Mountain Review LGBQT Chapbook Contest, and Proviso (Paper Machine Press, 2022), a text/image collaboration with the painter Kristen Tomecek. His work has earned him fellowships from Yaddo, the National Parks Arts Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Crosstown Arts Center. He has also been a translation scholar at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He has taught poetry writing and literature at Ripon College, the University of Mississippi, and St. Norbert College. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow in poetry and translation.

Susan L. Leary is the author of four poetry collections: Dressing the Bear, selected by Kimberly Blaeser was the winner of The Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of The Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for The Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Tar River Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, Superstition Review, On The Seawall, The Arkansas International, Slipstream, DMQ Review, jmww, Cherry Tree, Crab Creek Review, Verse Daily, Pithead Chapel, The MacGuffin, Christian Century, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Posit, The Ilanot Review, Louisiana Literature, and Parentheses Journal. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies, and recently, she was a finalist for The 16th Mudfish Poetry Prize, judged by Marie Howe; a finalist for The Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize, judged by Bernard Clay; a finalist for Midway Journal‘s -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest, judged by Jennifer Tseng; and shortlisted for The Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, judged by Charlotte Pence. She holds a B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from the University of Miami, where she taught Writing Studies for 15 years, and now lives in Indianapolis, IN and teaches at Indiana University Bloomington.

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. The author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance, Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and her monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have been included in exhibits such as “Ancient Light,” “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist who grew up on the reservation. She is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and a Wisconsin Library Association Notable Author award for her body of literary works as well as awards and fellowships from Wisconsin Arts Board, Wisconsin Humanities Council, Tribal College Journal, and Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters among others. A Professor Emerita at UW—Milwaukee and MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, Blaeser is an editorial board member for the University of Nebraska Press “American Indian Lives” series, serves on the Poetry Coalition of the Academy of American Poets and on the boards of directors of Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. Her writing is included in 100+ anthologies with selections translated into multiple languages including Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian, Hungarian, French, Slovene, Armenian, and Anishinaabemowin. Blaeser has performed at 400+ in-person and virtual venues around the globe from arctic Norway to the Kingdom of Bahrain. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.  http://kblaeser.org

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s completed memoir WHAT WE HOLD ON TO is the winner of Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award and will be published in the fall of 2024. She is currently working on a collection of essays, COMPLICATIONS OF CAPTIVITY. “Taking a Step Forward” and “Why We Needed a Prenup With Our Contractor” were published as “Modern Love” columns in The New York Times, and the "Tale of Two Primates" appeared as a "Menagerie" column in the New York Times Opinionator section. Deb won the Short Memoir Competition at the 2007 Philadelphia First Person Arts Festival. She has also received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship and an Individual Creative Artist-Special Opportunity Stipend for Literature (Poetry) from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her poetry, essays and feature articles have appeared in a range of literary journals and other publications including the Nashville Review, The Woven Tale Press, and Psychotherapy Networker. She has been a fellow in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Ragdale Foundation on a number of occasions for both poetry and nonfiction. A licensed clinical psychologist who has been in full time private practice for more than thirty years, Deb has experience in oncology, community mental health, and leadership consulting. Deb lives outside Philadelphia, PA with her husband, Marc, and Sofia Carmela, a cat with a whole lot of “tortitude.”