Judging our literary contests requires strong opinions, iron stomachs, and good eyes. For this, the third year of our fiction competition and the second year of its poetry counterpart, five people proved up to the task.
Joyce Brown, City Paper's poetry editor and a lecturer in the writing seminars at John Hopkins University, waded through villanelles, formal constructions, and a whole lot of free verse as the sole judge for the poetry contest.
The nearly 200 entries in the short-fiction contest required four judges: David Beaudouin, poet and founder of Tropos Press and The Pearl, Baltimore's oldest magazine of the literary arts; Faye Houston, recently retired head of Enoch Pratt Free Library's Humanities Department; Bruce Jacobs, poet and author of Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White Americans; and City Paper books editor Eileen Murphy.
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who entered.
