Announcing Three Contests for TQ36: A Prize for Cross-Disciplinary Texts, Judged by Hasanthika Sirisena; The Prose Open Prize, Judged by Diana Spechler, and a Poetry Prize to be Judged by Maya Popa!
Here’s more information about our distinguished judges…
Hasanthika Sirisena’s essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, WSQ, anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017) and named a notable essay by Best American Essays in 2022. They are the author of the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) . Their essay collection Dark Tourist (Ohio State University/Mad Creek Press, 2021) won the Gournay Prize and was short listed for a Lambda Literary award. They are a senior editor at Tupelo Quarterly Magazine and on the editorial boards of 7.13 Books and Great Circle Books, a UNC Series.
Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire and Skinny (both Harper Perennial) and of the New York Times Opinion series Going Off. She has written for the Guardian, GQ, Washington Post, Esquire, Electric Literature, New York, Paris Review Daily, the Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train Stories, Texas Monthly, the Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harper’s, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Boston Globe, National Geographic Traveler, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House Open Bar, BBC Travel, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Ploughshares, and many other publications. Her work has been included in a number of anthologies, including Indelible In The Hippocampus (McSweeney’s, 2019). The actress Kristen Vangsness has twice performed her short story Reality on Selected Shorts, most recently in August 2024. Spechler is also an eight-time Moth StorySLAM winner, who has been featured on the Moth Radio Hour, the Moth podcast, and NPR. Her awards and honors include the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, the Orlando Nonfiction Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation, a Yaddo residency, a Hawthorne Castle residency, a Ucross residency, a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University, the writer-in-residency at Portsmouth Abbey School, a LABA Fellowship, a fellowship from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, a Visiting Artist residency at the Betsy Hotel, and a Willapa Bay AIR residency. Her newsletter, Dispatches From The Road, is a Top 50 Travel Substack. She teaches writing for the Cedar Crest College PanEuropean MFA program.
Dr. Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023) named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry and a finalist for the Levis Reading Prize. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is previously the author of three chapbooks published in the US and the UK. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London and is at work on a book on literary wonder. Her newsletter,Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s best-selling literature publications. She works closely with established and emerging writers through Conscious Writers Collective, her online writing platform and community.