RBWG 2010 Contest Judges

Fiction

Sheri Reynolds is the author of five novels: Bitterroot Landing, The Rapture of Canaan (an Oprah Bookclub selection and #1 New York Times Bestseller), A Gracious Plenty, The Firefly Cloak, and The Sweet In Between.

She teaches creative writing and literature at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where she's an associate professor and the Ruth and Perry Morgan Chair of Southern Literature. www.sherireynolds.com

Nonfiction

Tom Horton was born and raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He grew up hunting, fishing, and consorting with watermen. As a reporter on the Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun (1972,1987), he won numerous awards, including The National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Communicator of the Year, The Scripps-Howard Meeman award for best conservation series (on the Amazon jungle), and The Kenny Rogers World Hunger Media Award (for reporting on the Ethiopian famine).Horton’s first book, Bay Country, a series of essays on the Chesapeake, won both the John Burroughs Medal for the country’s best natural history book of 1988 and a similar award from the Wildlife Society.

From 1987 until 1990, Horton and his family lived in the village of Tylerton, on Smith Island, Maryland, where he managed the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's education center His memoir, Island Out of Time, is based on this experience. In 2006 Horton retired from the Sun and now makes his living as a freelance writer. He is currently working on two books for W.W. Norton, a collection of nature essays and a historical, social and ecological look at the chicken

Poetry

Sue Ellen Thompson’s poems have been read on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor, have been featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column, and have received numerous awards, including the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize, the 2003 Pablo Neruda Prize, and two Individual Artist’s Grants from the State of Connecticut.  She is the author of four books, most recently The Leaving: New & Selected Poems (Autumn House,2001) and The Golden Hour (Autumn House, 2006), both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  She is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2005), a selection from the work of 94 American poets that is used in college classrooms across the country.

Sue Ellen has taught poetry at Middlebury College, Wesleyan University, Binghamton University and Central Connecticut State University.  She has given readings throughout New England, as well as at the National Arts Club in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and Galway University in Ireland.  She was the 1998 poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH, and participated for 13 summers in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. www.sueellenthompson.com