Pop Smart - Fiction Contest judges announced!
Come 5 p.m. today (Wednesday), we’ll be asking you to “STOP! Put your pens down!” For the deadline for the annual Creative Loafing Fiction Contest will have deadened everyone in their tracks. That’s the bad news.
The good news is we have a murderer’s row (or is that writer’s row?) of judges for this year’s contest, so your delicate prose will be in very good hands — and eyes.
First up is Fiona Zedde:
Fiona Zedde moved to the United States from Jamaica as a sweet, yet misunderstood, preteen. After spending a few years in Tampa and getting her undergraduate degree in gender studies and British and American literature at New College of Florida, she moved to Atlanta, Ga., where she currently lives. At the moment, she is, to quote a pithy bumper sticker, “the artist currently known as starving,” but she someday hopes to eat regular meals at the Ritz.
She is the author of four novels, Bliss, A Taste of Sin, Every Dark Desire and the upcoming Hungry for It. Her novellas “Pure Pleasure” and “Going Wild” are featured in the anthologies Satisfy Me (2006) and Satisfy Me Again (2007), respectively.
Next up is Joshilyn Jackson:
Joshilyn Jackson was born in the Deep South and raised by a tribe of wild fundamentalists who taught her to be virtuous and upright. Unfortunately, it didn’t take, and Ms. Jackson dropped out of college to pursue a career as an actor. She worked in regional repertoire and traveled the southern third of the country with a dinner theatre troupe, but after a few years she realized that she preferred writing plays to acting in them.
She decided both virtue and an education were worth the work, so she went back to college to study English literature, focusing on modern and medieval theater. She graduated with honors from Georgia State. …
Her short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her best-selling debut novel, Gods in Alabama, won SIBA’s 2005 Novel of the Year Award and was a No. 1 BookSense pick. Between, Georgia, was also a No. 1 BookSense pick, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to receive No. 1 status in back-to-back years. … Her third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming,http://joshilynjackson.com/tgwss.html will be published by GCP (formerly Warner Books) in March 2008.
And finally, we have David Fulmer:
David Fulmer has been a writer and producer for over 20 years. His first published novel, Chasing the Devil’s Tail, won a Shamus Award in 2002, along with nominations for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Falcon Award and a Barry Award, and was selected for Borders “Best of 2003 List” and other plaudits.
Jass, the second Storyville mystery, was published in January 2005. It was selected for the Best of 2005 lists by Library Journal and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Fiction. Rampart Street was published in January 2006. A BBC America audiobook of the novel was released in February 2006. It was selected for New York magazine’s list of “The Best Novels You’ve Never Read” and the audiobook version won the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award for Adult Fiction.
The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues was published in January 2007. The Blue Door will be published in January 2008, followed by Lost River in November 2008.