Judges 2022 – Winter

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born writer. Her debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian, 2015) was long-listed for the Word to Screen Prize at the Mumbai Film Festival, 2018. Her short story collection, Table Manners (Dahlia Publishing, 2018) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection (2019) and was a finalist for the Hall & Woodhouse DLF Prize, 2019. Her short stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4. She teaches creative writing at Winchester University, facilitates the ArtfulScribe Mayflower Young Writers programme in Southampton and has been involved in several Mayflower 400 projects in 2020. She was a mentor on Dahlia Publishing’s The Middle Way Mentoring Project. She was also the Writer-in-Residence at the Word Factory, London in 2021.

You can find her on Twitter: @Susmitatweets.

jj Peña

jj peña (pronouns he/they) is a queer, burrito-blooded writer. JJ is the winner of blue earth review’s 2019 flash non-fiction contest, cutbank’s 2019 big sky, small prose contest, mythic picnic’s 2020 postcard prize, & Santa Clara Review’s 2021 Flash Non-fiction contest. JJ’s work is included in the Best Microfiction 2020 anthology & Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions (2020). JJ is a 2021 Periplus fellow, holds a BA in both English and Anthropology, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. JJ’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Cincinnati Review, Massachusetts Review, & elsewhere. JJ serves as a flash fiction reader for Split Lip magazine.

Visit jj Pena’s website here.