Creative Writing: 2001-2002 Competition Judges
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING
Creative Non-Fiction
Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut. She is the author
of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), selected by Gerald Stern for the
Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. The book was listed
among the Washington Post's Favorite Books of 1994 and Bloomsbury Review's
Best Poetry books of the past fifteen years. The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence was
published by LSU in 1997. Deming has also published three nonfiction books,
Temporary Homelands (cloth, Mercury House 1994; paper, Picador USA 1996), The
Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA 1998) which was a finalist for the PEN
Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred into the Real (Milkweed Editions 2001,
Credo Series: Notable American Writers on Nature, Community and the Writer
Life); edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia
University Press, 1996, cloth; 1999, paper); and published the limited edition
chapbooks Girls in Jungle: What Does It Take for a Woman to Survive in the Arts (Kore
Press 1995) and Anatomy of Desire: The Daughter/Mother Sessions (Kore 2000),
a collaboration with her daughter, the painter Lucinda Bliss. Deming received an
MFA from Vermont College in 1983 and held the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at
Stanford University in 1987-88. She was a poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown in 1984-85, where she coordinated the fellowship program
for writers from 1988 to 1990. Her writing has won two fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1990 and 1995), fellowships from the Arizona
Commission on the Arts (1995) and the Tucson/Pima Arts Council (1993),
a Residency Award from the National Writer's Voice Project, the Pablo Neruda Prize
from NIMROD, a Pushcart Prize, the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry
Society of America, and the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative
NonFiction for the essay "Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide." Her poems
and essays have appeared in several magazines and anthologies. She currently is
Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and Director of
the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson.
ANNIE LOPEZ
One-Act Play
Annie Lopez is a visual artist working in photographic processes and installation. Her
work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationwide including the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Her work is in the collections of the City
of Phoenix, Arizona State University, Planned Parenthood, McDonald's Corporation
and Phoenix Children's Hospital. Lopez is also known for her performance art which
is inspired by her family and life experiences. Her stories are often full of bitterness
and sarcasm, some reflect on sadness and loss. Most are presented with a sense of
humor. Lopez lives with her husband and her artist son in her native Phoenix.
LUSIA SLOMKOWSKA
Short Story
Lusia Slomkowska is a poet, fiction-writer, essayist and translator. She has traveled,
lived and taught in Eastern Europe as well as a variety of locations in the United States.
She received a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Vermont College, where she was
awarded a merit scholarship. She has also studied at the Women's Writers Center,
Cazenovia, New York, and was a resident at St. Hilda's College, Oxford University,
Oxford, England. She has lectured, mentored and been a panelist at Phoenix College.
She has taught and directed exchange programs for the Experiment in International
Living, Brattleboro, Vermont; Freehand: A Community of Women Writers and
Photographers in Provincetown, Massachusetts; improvisational theater at the Yale
Cabaret Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. Last fall she was invited by the Polish
National Writers Union to film, interview, and translate various contemporary Polish
poets, including Adam Zagajewski, Krzysztof Koehler, and Marzena Broda. She has
also worked as an actuary, bread packer, dental assistant, and produce farmer. Her
current greatest passion, aside from beginning her second novel, is learning to play the
violin, which she "took up" at age 45.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Poetry
Mark Wunderlich's first book of poems, The Anchorage, was published in 1999 by the
University of Massachusetts Press and received the 1999 Lambda Literary Award. He
has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, the recipient
of the Writers at Work Poetry Fellowship and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry
at Stanford University. He has published individual poems in the Paris Review, Boston
Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, Poetry, and numerous recent anthologies, including
The New Young American Poets and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has
taught at Stanford University, Barnard College in New York and in the graduate writing
programs of San Francisco State University and Ohio University. During summers he
serves as Poetry Director for the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. He currently lives
in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
