2025 Literary Contest Judges

Our general submission period closed on December 1st. Thank you for sharing your work. We are thrilled to announce the judges for our annual literary contests in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in 2025! We will open for contest submissions from February 1st to March 15th, 2025. Please see our Submittable page for more details about our guest judges and guidelines.

POETRY:

Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), an NPR Best Book of 2023, a New York Times Book Review Critics Pick, and finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere, and she has served as visiting faculty for a variety of universities, arts organizations, and museums, including the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers’ Workshops.

FICTION:

Laura Chow Reeve is the author of the short story collection A Small Apocalypse. Her writing and graphic work can be found in The Offing, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and was a Blackburn Fellow at the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Richmond, VA. 

NONFICTION:

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship, and Negative Space. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, among others, and she writes the Substack newsletter The Word Cave. Dancyger lives in New York City, and teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College.