Introducing our Judges

The judges for the contest will be me, Halli Villegas, and Rosalva Gallardo-Valencia. You’ve heard lots about me, so let me introduce the other two judges.

Photo of HalliHalli Villegas is the author of three collections of poetry (Red Promises, In the Silence Absence Makes, and The Human Cannonball), a book of short stories ( The Hairwreath and Other Stories)  and several anthology pieces. She has published on-line erotica under a pen name. Her poetry and prose have appeared in places such as The LRC, Exile, Variety Crossings, Kiss Machine, Pagitica, Variety Crossings: Morphogenesis, The Windsor Review, and Canadian Notes and Queries. Her book of ghost stories The Hairwreath and Other Stories, came out in fall 2010 with Chizine Publications. Most recently she has had stories accepted for Chilling Tales 2, from Edge Publishing to launch in October 2012 and The White Collar Anthology with Black Moss Press to launch in fall of 2011. She is also the publisher of Tightrope Books, which has published over three hundred writers to date.

Photo of RosalvaRosalva Gallardo-Valencia is a PhD Candidate at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. She is also the co-editor of the book “Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse.” She conducts empirical studies on software engineering, specifically on source code search on the Web and Agile methodologies. She has six years of experience developing applications for telecommunication and financial organizations. Rosalva holds a B.S. degree in Informatics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

 

I’m very excited to have both Halli and Rosalva on board as judges.

In search of an esteemed panel of judges…

In addition to publicity and raising money for prizes (please donate!), I’m looking for judges.

My goal is to have three judges. I’m assuming that I’m going to have a sufficiently large number of entries that three judges are warranted. For the three judges, I wanted to one with an academic background (a professor of something tech-related or literary or…), one published author, and one aspiring author. I wanted the professor, because the story will be published as part of an academic book. The published author will bring a professional eye/ear. Including the aspiring author will help build community, both to educate the aspiring author about what it’s like to be a judge and to bring attention to a new voice.

I will likely end up being the academic judge. This seems appropriate, because I’m editing the book. If this is the case, I will not take an honorarium. Any money that I raise for honorariums will be divided among the other judges.

I’ve asked lots of published and aspiring authors and almost all have declined. (I do have one affirmative nibble that I’ll announce in the coming days.) Among the people I’ve asked are Vernor Vinge, Greg Wilson, Kavita Philip, Daniel José Older, Karl Schroeder, Antoinette LaFarge, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and Wil Wheaton. I’ve really enjoyed communicating with science fiction authors. They’ve all been really nice and actually took the time to answer the query. Although, they have all said “no,” it’s been a pleasure to come close to greatness.

Do you have any suggestions for who I should ask?