Creative Writing: 2005-2006 Competition Judges
Mark Wunderlich
POETRY
Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage which received the 1999 Lambda
Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude, published in 2004 by Graywolf Press. He is
the recipient of a NEA Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Wallace
Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and two fellowships from the Fine Arts
Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A resident of New York's Hudson Valley,
Mark is faculty for literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont, and also
faculty at Columbia University for their Graduate Writing Program.
Billy Gunn
ONE-ACT PLAY
Billy Gunn, a former student of Mesa and Scottsdale Community Colleges, is currently
a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures. After completing a B.A. in Russian at Arizona State
University in 2001, he did graduate work in Theatre at Brigham Young University.
Billy's various responsibilities in the theatre have included work as actor, director,
dramaturg, producer, translator and teacher. Billy has taught classes in acting at
Scottsdale Community College's summer conservatory program, and while at BYU, he
taught classes in acting, theatre history, and film. Between 1994 and 2001, Billy was
an actor for the Southwest Shakespeare Company in Mesa, where in 1996 he received
an AriZoni Award for his role in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Ken Levinson
FICTION
Ken Levinson has been writing literary fiction since the mid-1990's. He completed his
first novel, Traveling in Anhedonia, and is currently at work on his second novel,
Reclaiming My Mother, in addition to a novella. He was an artist-in-residence at the
Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in October 2003 and at the Ragdale Foundation in
August 2005. He attended the Wesleyan Writers Conference in 2004 and 2005 and has
also taken several advanced fiction workshops at the Unterberg Poetry Center of 92nd
Street and the New School, both of New York. Ken has been on the faculty at Borough
of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York since 1983 where
he teaches writing to English as Second Language students, as well as linguistics. He
completed a doctorate in languages and literature at Teachers College, Columbia
University in 1993. He has pursued a career in Latin music, playing piano in several
professional, recorded salsa bands both locally and in Latin America.
Constance Alexander
ESSAY
Constance Alexander won a poetry contest in 4th grade and has been writing ever
since. Award-winning columnist, poet, playwright, and independent producer of
public radio documentaries, she is currently working on the libretto for a chamber
opera entitled, The Way Home; and also completing her first novel, Thirty-One Fat Ladies
on a Bus. In 2004, Poets & Writers Inc. tapped Constance for the prestigious Writers
Exchange award in fiction. Her chapbook of poems, dreamfish, was published in 2006
and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ms. Alexander's newspaper column,
Main Street, has been cited for excellence numerous times by the Kentucky Press
Association, and she recently became a regular contributor to the Louisville Courier-
Journal op-ed page. An accomplished playwright, her drama about the aftermath of
September 11, Last Call, will be published in The Art of the One-Act, an anthology of
Western Michigan University Press. Kilroy Was Here, a performance piece about World
War II from the viewpoint of children, was published by Doubleday and continues to
be performed by community theatre and school groups around the country.
