I’m excited to say that Peter Orner has agreed to judge our Winter Fiction Contest next year. I’ve wanted to announce for a while, but we had the 07 contest running, and we clearly still have a long way to go until December 1st, 2007 (the PM deadline), but now you know. So start thinking about submitting and put that date on your calenders.

I’ve copied his Bio off his website for those of you who aren’t familiar with him and his work. If you’re interested in learning more, click on this.

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize and is being translated into French, Italian, and German. The novel is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990’s.

Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award.

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual.

In 2006, Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Orner is on leave from San Francisco State University and living in up-state New York where he is writer-in-residence at Bard College.

That’s all for now.

We’ll have details up shortly at the official website.
As for the upcoming Greg Grummer poetry contest, I’ll check with Wade and then we’ll announce what’s going on with that when I learn something.