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Introducing the Judges for our 27th Annual Literary Contest

Powell, L'Abbé. Houle, and Murakami

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the judges for our 27th annual literary contest! Kerry Lee Powell, this year's UNB Writer-in-Residence, is our fiction judge. And judging our poetry category are Sonnet L'Abbé, Jennifer Houle, and Sachiko Murakami. Our contest closes on December 1, 2017. See full contest submission guidelines here

Kerry Lee Powell was born in Montreal. Her most recent book Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Award for English Language Fiction. She is the 2017 writer-in-residence at UNB.

Sonnet L’Abbé, Ph.D. is the author of A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, and was the 2014 guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry. Her chapbook, Anima Canadensis, was published by Junction Books in 2016, and she has work in Best American Experimental Writing 2016. In her next collection, Sonnet’s Shakespeare, which will be out in 2018, L’Abbé “writes over" all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets.  In 2017, L'Abbé was faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives on Vancouver Island and is a professor of Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University.

Jennifer Houle has been publishing poems since much earlier in the millennium (recognizing that it is still very early). Along the way, her work has won several awards, including the Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize from The Antigonish Review in 2009. Her first book, The Back Channels (Signature Editions, 2016) won the J.M. Abraham East Coast Literary Award for best collection of poetry and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In its infancy, the book was also awarded the Writer's Federation of New Brunswick's Alfred G. Bailey Award for best manuscript. A life-long Maritimer, she lives just outside of Fredericton with her husband and two sons. Website: www.jenniferhoule.com

Sachiko Murakami is the author of three collections of poetry: The Invisibility Exhibit, Rebuild, and Get Me Out Of Here. Her digital poetry projects include Project Rebuild, HENKŌ, and FIGURE (with a rawlings). She has been a literary worker for numerous presses, journals, and organizations, has been a poetry editor for Insomniac Press and Talonbooks, and was the 2017 Jack McClelland Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. Recently she conducted a series of conversations with writers about the perils of the writing life at writingsohard.com. She lives in Toronto.

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