About the Jury
Jamila Felton
Jamila Felton is a Library Associate for the D.C. Public Library, and is responsible for Young Adult Services at a neighborhood branch. She is a certified English teacher who taught high school students in Boston and Washington, D.C. 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.
Jim Ferris
Jim Ferris is an award-winning poet and disability studies scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book The Hospital Poems is about his boyhood experiences at a charity hospital for children with disabilities. He has been a musician, performance artist, director, playwright, and actor, performing from the West Coast to the East, from Texas to Canada. Ferris, who has a congenital leg impairment, 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. A winner of multiple teaching awards, Ferris teaches courses in communication arts and disability studies.
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 for the Performing Arts, and is a five-time Larry Neal Award winner.