Role: Judge

Janet Webster Jones, a retired public school educator and the daughter of a public librarian, is the founder of Source Booksellers. Established in 1989 and based in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood, Source Booksellers is a unique niche of nonfiction books that serves a wide community of readers near and far.

(Photo credit: Noah Stephens)

Thor Hanson is the author of six books, including Feathers, Buzz, The Triumph of Seeds, and Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and has earned many accolades, including the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books, and three Pacific Northwest Book Awards. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Switzer Fellow, and winner of the John Burroughs Medal.

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Michelle Malonzo is currently the Head of Operations at The Word, A Storytelling Sanctuary and was previously a buyer at Changing Hands Bookstore in Arizona. Michelle has served on the board of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), as well as the ABA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, and the board of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association. She received the 2021 BIPOC Bookseller Award for Leadership as well as a 2020 Bookselling Without Borders Fellowship, and was a judge for the 2019 Kirkus Fiction Prize.

(Photo credit: Kyle Hague)

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and Callaloo, among others, and in several anthologies. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

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Pam Houston is the author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. She is also the co-author of Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place, among other books. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She cofounded the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers, and is fiction editor at Terrain.org. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

(Photo credit: Mike Blakemen)

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife, all published by CavanKerry Press. She is the former executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Currently, she is an associate professor at Salem State University and serves on the boards of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Mass Poetry, and Montserrat College of Art.

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Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections: Beautiful in the Mouth, The Keys to the Jail, and All Its Charms, which includes poems published in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Previously a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Keetje currently lives with her wife and children in Missoula where she is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana. She is Editor of Poetry Northwest and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.

(Photo credit: Gabriella Graceffo)

Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of farmworkers, a former United States Poet Laureate and California Poet Laureate, and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Awards, and a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Sunriders” was engraved on NASA’s Lucy spacecraft launched in 2021. He has written over 30 books across genres.

(Photo credit: Carlos Puma)