Meet the Judges

Marisa (Mac) Crane is a writer, basketball player, and sweatpants enthusiast. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Lit Hub, The Sun, No Tokens, Passages North, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. An American Short Fiction Merit Fellow and Sewanee Writing Conference Fellow, they are the author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, which was a January Indie Next Pick and New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022. Alabi’s poems appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review and Best New Poets. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.

Edgar Gomez (all pronouns) is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, their words have appeared in Poets & Writers, Narratively, Catapult, Lithub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere online and in print. Their memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by The New York Times, named a Best Book of 2022 by Publisher’s Weekly, Buzzfeed, and Electric Literature, received a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir. Their second book, a memoir about growing up poor in early 2000’s Florida titled Alligator Tears, will be out in 2025 from Crown. They live in New York and Puerto Rico.