About the Jury
Jim Ferris
Jim Ferris is an award-winning poet and disability studies scholar at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The Hospital Poems, his first book of poems, was selected by Edward Hirsch for the 2004 Main Street Rag Book Award. His chapbook The Facts of Life was published by Parallel Press in July 2005. His essay “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics” was lead essay in The Georgia Review’s special summer 2004 issue on poetry and poetics; it was published online by Poetry Daily, a leading poetry site on the Internet, as its featured prose piece in August 2004. With experience as performance artist, director, playwright, and actor, Ferris has performed from the West Coast to the East Coast, from Texas to Canada. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, ranging from the Michigan Quarterly Review to weekly newspapers. He has received two Literary Artist Fellowship Awards – one in poetry, one in creative nonfiction – from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Ferris is past president of the Society for Disability Studies, the leading international scholarly organization in Disability Studies. At the University of Wisconsin, he supervises the instructional staff in speech composition. Winner of multiple teaching awards, Ferris teaches courses in communication arts and disability studies.
Main Street Rag Publishing Company: Writing by Jim Ferris
Dolores Kendrick
A native Washingtonian, Dolores Kendrick was appointed Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia in 1999. She has authored three books: Through the Ceiling, Now Is the Thing to Praise, and The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women, the latter of which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and inspired a musical CD and an award-winning adaptation for the stage. A Fulbright Fellow and Honorary Doctorate of Letters degree holder from St. Bonaventure University, Kendrick has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, among numerous other honors. She earned a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship to Northern Ireland and an invitation from the Chinese government to lecture at the Shanghai School of Foreign Languages. In recent years, she was commissioned by the city to write poems for an Albert Paley sculpture at the PEPCO building and for artwork at the New York Avenue Metro station.
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities - Poet Laureate
Nancy Schwalb
Nancy Schwalb is the founder of the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop and the Youth Poetry Slam League. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University and has been teaching creative writing at Hart Middle School since 1995. Her work has been published in the GW Review, the Washington City Paper, Vanity Fair, Barragua, and Argus. She has served as a teaching fellow for the Kennedy Center and is a five-time Larry Neal Award winner.
D.C. Creative Writing Workshop
Jamila Wade
A newcomer to the Washington, D.C. area, Jamila Wade is Executive Director of the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop. She is a certified English teacher who taught high school students in Boston for three years. She graduated from Spelman College and holds a Masters of Education from Harvard University. Jamila is also an artist and a writer whose work has been published in Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees and bum rush the page: a def poetry jam.