Judging TQ’s Prize for Innovation in Scholarly Writing is Aliza Wong
Aliza Wong is director of the American Academy in Rome and professor of History and Honors at Texas Tech University. Her research focus is modern Italy and the Mediterranean with a particular concentration in race, nation, culture, and identity. A dedicated educator, she has taught for two decades at Texas Tech University where she has won numerous teaching and research awards. Her current research examines Italian constructions of the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the realm of public and engaged scholarship, Wong is director of the Texas Liberators Project, a multimedia educational initiative that includes an app, educational resources, interactive maps, museum and digital exhibits, and a book. She is also the producer of the documentary film, Narratives of Modern Genocide (dir. Paul Allen Hunton, 2021) and curator of the corresponding museum exhibition, both funded by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission.
Judging TQ’s Poetry Prize is Clarence Major
Among Clarence Major’s previous seventeen poetry collections are Swallow the Lake (a National Council on the Arts winner), Configurations: New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award Bronze Medal winner), Four Days in Algeria (2925) and Sporadic Troubleshooting (2022). He has contributed poetry to the New Yorker, Harvard Review, American Scholar, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and dozens of other periodicals. A Fulbright scholar, among Major’s other awards are a Western States Book Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature. He was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth-century American literature at the University of California, Davis.
Judging TQ’s Prose Open Prize is Katie Farris
Katie Farris is the author of the memoir-in-poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), which was listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023, as well as shortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize. She is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the chapbooks A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), and Mother Superior in Hell (Dancing Girl, 2019). Most recently she is winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the co-translator of several books of poetry from the Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian, most recently, The Country Where Everyone’s Name is Fear, Translations of Lydmila and Boris Khersonsky. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently an Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
Judging TQ’s Prize Cross-Disciplinary Work is Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.