Arts & Letters Announces Judges for 2021 Prize Competition

23rd Annual Arts & Letters Prize Competition Judges Announced

2021 Prize Judges

Poetry: Romeo Oriogun

Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press) and The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series and Burnt Men, an electronic chapbook published by Praxis. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and others. He was the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the Ebedi International Residency, Harvard University Department of English, The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Creative Non-Fiction: Kristi Coulter

Kristi Coulter is the author of the memoir-in-essays Nothing Good Can Come From This, a 2019 finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Elle, the Believer, Vox, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is a former Ragdale Foundation resident and a 2020 Mineral School Fellow. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington and Hugo House. Kristi’s next memoir, Exit Interview, is forthcoming from MCD x FSG in 2022. She lives in Seattle with her husband and dogs.

Fiction: Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. She has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at Oxford University, the Nordic Africa Institute and Vassar College. In 2017, she received the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award for her work. Her collection, Shadows, was published by Kwela in South Africa to critical acclaim and won the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. A native of Zimbabwe who has lived in South Africa and the USA, Tshuma’s writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares and Swallowed by a Whale: How to Survive the Writing Life. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board and is an editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature based in San Fransisco. Tshuma teaches fiction at Emerson College, and has previously taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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