Claudia Ann Seaman Awards Judges

2020-2021

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Tara Betts, Poetry

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Dr. Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit, Arc & Hue, and the forthcoming Refuse to Disappear. In addition to working as an editor, a teaching artist, and a mentor for other writers, she has taught at several universities. She is the Inaugural Poet for the People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago and founder of Whirlwind Learning Center.

Crystal Hana Kim, Fiction

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Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice title and named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. She was a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Finalist, a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner, and has received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Hedgebrook. Her work has been published in Elle Magazine, The Paris Review, Guernica, Glamour Magazine, and elsewhere. A contributing editor at Apogee Journal, she also teaches at Columbia University and in the Randolph College MFA program. 

Beth Kohl, Creative Nonfiction

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Beth Kohl has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. in English Literature from Northwestern University, and an M.F.A in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She is the author of Embryo Culture: Making Babies in the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Sarah Crichton Books), and has contributed writing and editing to Brain, Child, Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers, Chicago Reader, Tulane Review, and Huffington Post.  Beth has worked for Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and Euro RSCG Tatham in public affairs and advertising.  She also has served on Capitol Hill and in the communications office of the 1996 and 2000 Democratic National Conventions.  

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