Fall 2023 Judge Bios

Sarah Wyman, PhD, lives in the Hudson Valley where she writes and teaches about 20th & 21st century literature and the visual arts. She directs the Faculty Center at SUNY New Paltz and co-facilitates the Sustainability Learning Community. She teaches poetry workshops at Shawangunk Prison. Her poems have appeared in aaduna, Mudfish, Ekphrasis, San Pedro River Review, Potomac Review, Lightwood, Heron Clan VII, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Poets of the Hudson Valley, and other venues. She published books as well: Sighted Stones (FLP 2018) and Fried Goldfinch (Codhill 2021).

 

Sarah Wyman <wymans@newpaltz.edu>

Florina Nastase is a Romanian writer and university lecturer in the Department of English at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi. She holds a Ph.D. in Philology following the defense of her thesis on confessionalism in the poetry of twentieth-century American women poets, which she has also published as a book. She has been lucky enough to be twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and find a home for her works in places such as Hobart, Gasher Journal, The Decadent Review, Pangyrus, The Maine Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and others. Her work tackles both the dreamlike and the grotesque, the intimate and the impersonal.

 

Florina Nastase <fnastase60@yahoo.com>

John Guzlowski’s poems about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his award-winning memoir in poetry Echoes of Tattered Tongues.  His most recent books of poems are Mad Monk Ikkyu, True Confessions, and Small Talk: Writing about God and Writing and Me (available at snakenationpress.org). He is also the author of the Hank and Marvin Mysteries (reviewed in the New York Times) and a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

 

John Guzlowski <jzguzlowski@gmail.com

Pat Riviere-Seel is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, When There Were Horses (2021, Main Street Rag). She is a former president of the North Carolina Poetry Society and former Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference. She taught poetry writing classes for the University of North Carolina’s Great Smokies Writing Program and served two years as the NCPS Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the state’s western region. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She is a former journalist, publicist, editor, teacher and lobbyist.

 

Pat Riviere-Seel  <patriviereseel@yahoo.com>