Adult Short Story Contest Judges
Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own (2018) and Salt the Snow (2020). Her short stories have been published in multiple literary journals, and she is a senior editor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She lives in Silver Spring with her family and four ridiculous cats.
Melanie S. Hatter is the author of two novels and one collection of short stories. Her most recent novel, Malawi’s Sisters, was selected by Edwidge Danticat as the winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize and was published by Four Way Books in 2019. Her debut novel, The Color of My Soul, won the 2011 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize, and Let No One Weep for Me: Stories of Love and Loss was released in 2015. She is a participating author with the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program and serves on the board of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She lives in Silver Spring.
Mohini Malhotra is originally from Nepal and is a Washington, D.C.-based writer, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and founder of a social enterprise to promote female-identifying artists and invest in causes that better women’s and girls’ lives (artbywomen.gallery). Her fiction has appeared in several anthologies—including This Is What America Looks Like; Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology; and with the West Virginia University Press—and in literary journals, including Gravel, Bloom, West Texas Literary Review, Silver Birch Press, Blink-Ink, Flash Frontier, Star 82 Review, A Quiet Courage and The Writer’s Center Magazine.
High School Short Story Contest Judges
Zach Powers is the author of the novel First Cosmic Velocity (Putnam, 2019) and the story collection Gravity Changes (BOA Editions, 2017). His writing has been featured by American Short Fiction, Lit Hub, Tin House Online, The Washington Post and others. He serves as artistic director for The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, he now lives in Arlington, Virginia. His website is zachpowers.com.
Julia Tagliere’s work has appeared in The Writer, Potomac Review, Gargoyle, the Washington Independent Review of Books and elsewhere. She completed her Master of Arts in writing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and is the winner of the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition for Best Short Story, the 2017 Writer’s Center Undiscovered Voices Fellowship and the 2021 Nancy Zafris Short Story Fellowship. In 2019 she founded the Montgomery County Underground Writers Showcase to promote the work of local writers. She serves as an editor with The Baltimore Review and is the recipient of a 2022 Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Sandy Spring.
Claudia Wair is a writer from Stafford, Virginia. Her work has appeared in WWPH Writes, Tangled Locks Journal, JMWW and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction and Best of the Net. Find her at claudiawair.com or on Twitter @cwtellstales.
Essay Contest Judges
Neisha-Anne Green is the director of the Academic Student Services Writing Center at the Academic Support and Access Center at American University. She has presented at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, the Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference, and the Conference on College Composition & Communication. She also has had presentations accepted at the International Writing Centers Association Conference as well as the Conference on Cultural Rhetoric. She is a social/academic justice accomplice, always interrogating and exploring the use of everyone’s language as a resource, and she is getting better at speaking up for herself and others.
Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection The View From Stalin’s Head (winner of the Rome Prize in Literature) and the novels Faith For Beginners (a Lambda Literary Award nominee), Nirvana is Here (winner of a bronze medal in the 2019 Foreword Indie Awards), and Hotel Cuba, published by Harper Perennial in May 2023. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, and O, The Oprah Magazine. He teaches writing at the George Washington University and the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Ofelia Montelongo is a bilingual writer from Mexico. She has a master of arts in Latin American literature. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Latino Book Review, Los Acentos Review and elsewhere. She was the 2019 Undiscovered Voices fellow at The Writer’s Center. She currently teaches at the George Washington University and was a PEN/Faulkner writer in residence, a 2021 Macondista, and a PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. She lives in Gaithersburg.
Organizer of the Short Story Contests
Caroline Bock is the author of Carry Her Home, which won the fiction award from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and of LIE and Before My Eyes, young adult novels from St. Martin’s Press. A winner of The Writer magazine’s short story award and the Adrift short story award, her creative work has also appeared recently in SmokeLong, Brevity, Gargoyle, Grace & Gravity: DC Women Writers, Jarnal and more. She is co-president at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a nonprofit independent literary press based in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Syracuse University, she studied creative writing with Raymond Carver and earned a master of fine arts in fiction from the City University of New York. She lives in Potomac with her family and is working on a novel.
Contest Information
Bethesda Magazine and the Bethesda Urban Partnership work together to honor local writers through the short story and essay contests. Short stories are limited to 4,000 words, and authors must be residents of Montgomery County or Upper Northwest D.C. (20015 and 20016 ZIP codes). Essays are limited to 500 words and writers in the adult contest must live in Washington, D.C., or select counties of Maryland (Montgomery, Prince George’s, Howard and Frederick) or Virginia (Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William); high school writers must be residents of or attend a school in Montgomery County or Washington, D.C.
Keep an eye out this winter for next year’s contest details at moco360.media and at bethesda.org.
