Contest for Creative Nonfiction Judges Announced

Announcing our Guest Judges

judges in collage banner kaylie jones becky bradway phil brady and jesse watersHippocampus Magazine is proud to announce our guest judges for the Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction. Our four judges bring with them to this competition more than a century of collective literary and publishing experience spanning genres and professions.

We’re pleased and honored to welcome, in the order pictured above, the following folks

  • Kaylie Jones, novelist, memoirst, teacher
  • Becky Bradway, essayist, novelist, teacher
  • Philip Brady, writer, poet, teacher, executive director of Etruscan Press
  • Jesse Waters, writer, poet, teacher, director of Bowers Writers House

to the judging panel. These four prolific creative writers will select the six winners from the contest finalists. Before we introduce you to our judges, here’s a piece of writing contest advice from Jesse.

“Contests can be a real challenge; you’re gambling, in a sense, on your own talent, and it’s easy to be blinded by your own desire, passion and ambition. It’s always a good idea to research the judges, and get to know them a bit. Not that we look only for work that’s like our own, or that we relate to in direct sense of artistry… but knowing what we’ve written, and who we read/teach can sometimes be an advantage.”

— Jesse Waters

More writing contest tips from our gracious judges and editorial panel to follow between now and the deadline.


Meet our Judges

Learn more about our guest judges, from their publishing credits to other literary endeavors.

Becky Bradway

becky bradway headshot wearing hatBecky Bradway has published stories and creative essays in magazines and anthologies such as Creative Nonfiction, North American Review, Ninth Letter, Antioch Review, Hotel Amerika, Identity Theory, Post Road, E: The Environmental Magazine, DoubleTake, etc.

Her collection of short memoir and new journalistic pieces, Pink Houses and Family Taverns, was published by Indiana University Press. Her craft book on creative nonfiction was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2009.

Her creative nonfiction essays and stories have been cited as recommended reading in Best American Essays, Best American Stories, and the Pushcart anthology. Her current project is a novel about the turn-of-the-century writers Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale; her blog about that book can be found at Intothebeautifulnew.com. She lives in Denver with her husband and dogs and occasionally an adult child that pops in; she is an obsessive listener of all types of music; and she spends as much time as possible in the mountains.

Kaylie Jones

kaylie jonesKaylie Jones is the author of five novels, including A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which was made into a Merchant – Ivory film in 1998. The novel Celeste Ascending was published by Harper Collins in 2001, and the memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me, was published to critical acclaim in 2009.

She has been teaching creative writing for almost 25 years at The Writers Voice, SUNY Stony Brook –Southampton MFA Program, and the Wilkes University low-residency MFA Program, and is Chairman of the annual $10,000 James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

Jesse Waters

jesse waters at writers house books behind himRunner-up for the Iowa Review Fiction Prize, finalist in the Glimmer Train 2003 Poetry Open, The Davoren Hanna International Poetry Contest and the 2010 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest, Jesse Waters is a recipient of a 2003 NC Artists’ Grant to attend the Vermont Studio Center, and a winner of the 2001 River Styx International Poetry Contest.

Currently a visiting assistant professor in the English Department at Elizabethtown College, Jesse’s fiction, poetry and nonfiction work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, and has appeared in such journals as 88: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, The Adirondack Review, Coal Hill Review, The Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Concrete Wolf, Iowa Review, Plainsongs, Magma, River Styx, Slide, Story Quarterly, Southeast Review, Sycamore Review and others. His first book of poems, Human Resources, was released by Inkbrush Press in February of 2011. Jesse is also director of Bowers Writers House, an interdisciplinary venue at E-town College.

Philip Brady

phil brady in hat outsideBorn and raised in New York City, Philip Brady received a B.A. from Bucknell University, M.A.s from the University of Delaware and San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Binghamton.

His poetry and essays have appeared in over fifty journals in the United States and Ireland, including Abraxas, The American Literary Review, The Belfast Literary Supplement, Centennial Review, College English, Green Mountains Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Laurel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Northwest, Thought & Action, and other journals. Translated into Spanish, Polish, Norwegian, and Hebrew, his poems have been published internationally.

Brady is the author of three collections of poetry, Fathom, (Word Press, 2007); Weal (winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press); and Forged Correspondences, (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin.

His essay collection, By Heart: Reflections of a Rust-Belt Bard, (University of Tennessee, 2008) was named Essay Book of the Year by Foreword Magazine. A memoir, To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations & The Afterlife, was published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2003. He co‑edited, with James F.Carens, Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (Twayne,1998).

Brady’s work has received the Ohioana Poetry Award in 2008, five Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowships, three Best of Ohio Writers Contest Prizes, a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer’s Prize (Ireland) and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), The Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle, (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland.

He is Executive Director of Etruscan Press, a national literary publishing house which he co-founded in 2001, with a mission to produce and promote books that nurture the dialogue among genres, achieve a distinctive voice, and reshape our literary and cultural landscapes. Etruscan publishes books in five genres, and has produced two National Book Award Finalists, earned four NEA grants, and had work reprinted in Best American Poetry,

Brady has taught at University College Cork in Ireland, as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the National University of Zaire, in the Semester at Sea Program, and in the Wilkes University Low-Residency MFA Program. Currently he is a Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he directs the Poetry Center and acts as YSU coordinator for the Northeast Ohio MFA Consortial Program. He plays in the New-Celtic band, Brady’s Leap, which has produced two CDs of original music.

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