Hippocampus Magazine Announces Judges for the 2012 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction

Hippocampus Magazine is honored to announce our guest judges for the Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction. Our three panelists bring with them decades of collective literary and publishing experience spanning genres and professions. Also, now in its second year, our contest is starting a tradition of welcoming our previous year’s winner to the judging panel.

OK. On the the news! These three wordsmiths will select the six winners from the contest finalists:

• Beverly Donofrio, memoirist, novelist, essayist
• Kevin Oderman, literary essayist, novelist, professor
• Susan Rukeyser, award-winning essayist, novelist, publishing professional

The contest, which will award $400+ in prizes, is accepting works of creative nonfiction of up to 3,500 words until Sept. 15, 2012. Winning stories will be published in the November 2012 issue of Hippocampus, coinciding with National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month. A portion of the $10 contest entry fee will benefit the organization.

To learn more about the contest and view submissions guidelines, visit our Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction page.

 More About Our Judges:

Beverly Donofrio has written for print, radio, and TV. Her first memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys, has been translated into fifteen languages and became a popular motion picture. Donofrio’s second memoir, Looking for Mary, (or, The Blessed Mother and Me), began as a documentary on NPR then was published to critical acclaim and chosen as a Discover Book at Barnes & Noble. Her picture book, Mary and the Mouse, the Mouse and Mary, was named a Top Ten Children’s book by Amazon, and Thank You, Lucky Stars, her middle-grade novel continues to win fans. Her radio essays have won awards, she wrote and starred in a documentary on the status of women for PBS, and she can sometimes be heard as a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her personal essays have appeared in many anthologies, as well as in national newspapers and magazines, such as O, the Oprah Magazine, Spirituality and Health, Allure, More, New York Magazine, The LA Times, The Washington Post. A sequel to her picture book, Maria and Mouse Mouse, will be released in 2013. And her widely anticipated new memoir with Viking Penguin, Astonished, a Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace and Solace, will appear on March 7, 2013. Donofrio currently resides happily on an island off the coast of Maine. Her website is www.beverlydonofrio.com.

Kevin Oderman started his writing life as a literary critic. The Ph.D. kind. He wrote many essays on modern and postmodern poetry and even published a critical book, Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium. Subsequently, he said no to all that. He wrote poems for the little mags and started writing literary essays, an exercise which led to How Things Fit Together (winner of a Bakeless Prize in nonfiction). He published an expatriate novel, Going. He’s been writing literary nonfiction about travel for years now; at present, he is at work gathering those pieces together into a volume, “Cannot Stay.” Twice he has lived abroad as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught Modern American Poetry as a Senior Lecturer at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and subsequently American literature to M.A. students at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a Professor of English at West Virginia University and teaches in the low-res MA/MFA Program at Wilkes University. His second novel, White Vespa, is slated to appear at the end of the year from Etruscan Press.

Susan Rukeyser is the winner of the 2011 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction, where she also won the Reader’s Choice Award. Her winning story, “X-rays are My Souvenirs” also was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A Skidmore College undergraduate fiction award winner, Susan was an art major till she switched to the infinitely more practical English/creative writing. She enjoys sarcasm. Susan earned her Creative Writing MA from Lancaster University, UK. She was a senior book buyer for the wholesaler Baker & Taylor, and from 2002-2010 she wrote award citations for the Educational Book & Media Association. For a while she owned a tiny used bookstore in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Atticus Review, Eclectic Flash, Ink Sweat & Tears, Melusine, Metazen, PANK, Short Fast and Deadly and others. She does her best to explain herself here: www.susanrukeyser.com.