Essay Contest
Swift Stiles Dickison, a professor at Montgomery College since 2001, has taught a variety of writing and literature courses. He also has served as the associate editor of the Potomac Review for several years. Dickison has traveled and worked in the Caribbean, Europe, China, Australia and New Zealand. He holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in English and has taught at colleges including Frederick Community College, Gettysburg College and Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
Barbara Esstman is the co-editor with Virginia Hartman of A More Perfect Union: Poems and Stories About the Modern Wedding. Esstman is also the author of The Other Anna and Night Ride Home. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Lear's magazine and Confrontation, among other publications, and she has won the Redbook fiction award and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She teaches creative writing at area universities and at The Writer's Center in Bethesda.
Julie Rasicot is a senior editor at Bethesda Magazine. She often writes about education, and for three years wrote a blog covering local schools for the magazine’s website. She also is a former blogger for Education Week, wrote about local news and schools as a longtime freelancer for The Washington Post and was managing editor of The Montgomery Journal. An adjunct professor for the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., she lives in Silver Spring with her husband and two daughters.
Adult Short Story
Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his short story collection, The View From Stalin's Head. His novel, Faith For Beginners, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. He has received fellowships from The Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and has taught writing at Columbia University, New York University and George Washington University, and in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program. A Capitol Hill resident, he's working on a novel titled The White Noose.
Susi Wyss is the author of The Civilized World, a novel in stories set across Africa that was named a “Book to Pick Up Right Now” by O, The Oprah Magazine. Her work has received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She lives in Silver Spring and is working on a second novel.
Elizabeth Word Gutting’s fiction, nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, The Quotable, Treehouse and Defying Gravity, an anthology of D.C. female writers published by Paycock Press. A resident of Washington, D.C., she has received fellowships from George Mason University, the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholar. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, she has lived in rural Ohio and the Mission District of San Francisco, and on a tangerine farm on the island of Jeju in South Korea.
Young Adult Short Story
Madelyn Rosenberg grew up in Virginia and lives with her husband and children in Arlington. After working for more than a decade at daily newspapers, she turned her attention to creative writing. She is the author of six books for kids, including Dream Boy, a novel for young adults she wrote with her friend Mary Crockett, Nanny X, and How to Behave at a Tea Party. She also works as a freelance magazine writer.
Robin Talley’s first novel, Lies We Tell Ourselves, about two girls on the front lines of the school desegregation battle in 1959 Virginia, was a Junior Library Guild selection and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her second young adult novel, What We Left Behind, will be released by Harlequin Teen in October. Talley and her wife live on Capitol Hill with an anti-social cat and a goofy hound dog. She also works in communications for a nonprofit organization in Dupont Circle.
Caroline Tung Richmond is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Baltimore Sun and Highlights, among other publications, and on USAToday.com. Her debut novel, The Only Thing to Fear, was published by Scholastic Press in 2014. A self-proclaimed history nerd, Richmond lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband, their daughter, and the family dog, Otto von Bismarck, named for the German chancellor.
