2020-2021 JURORS                

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Women residing in, or who have strong ties to any
of the 420 Appalachian counties are eligible to submit.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications. Her third full-length poetry collection, Down, was released in 2020 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, and in 2017 she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.

Chris Green From the first time his mother showed him where the tiny snowdrop flowers would be sprouting in their yard, Chris has been discovering where he’s from. In the process, he discovered poetry, Appalachia, and now the Women of Appalachia Project. Chris is the director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College where he also Chair the Appalachian Studies Department. He serves the region (and nation!) though his scholarship and reviews, his poetry, his advice to presses, and encouragement to writers of all types. His most recent publication is a poetry chapbook dedicated to the arts in Eastern Kentucky, which can be found here.  Chris is author of Rushlight: Poems and The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism, which won the Weatherford Award for the best nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. He has also edited Coal: A Poetry Anthology. Over the last decade, Chris has written about 1,000 poems in the haikai tradition as actualized through his position as a white, cis-male, Buddhist professor living in Huntington, West Virginia, and Berea, Kentucky.