Our Finalists
Katherine Wei is in the class of 2022 at BASIS Chandler. She writes poetry
and enjoys acrylic painting. Her work has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art and
Writing Awards, the National Council of Teachers of English, and Princeton University's Lewis
Center for the Arts. In her free time, she likes to play volleyball and longboard.
Our Judges
Sean Avery Medlin (he/they) is a gamer and Hip-Hop nerd, who teaches creative writing and produces cultural work in the Southwest US, while also creating rap, poetry, prose and performance. Their Hip-Hop play and album, skinnyblk, along with all their previous work, is available online at superseanavery.com. 808s & Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, & Mythologies is Medlin’s debut collection, releasing on September 14th, 2021, from indie book publisher Two Dollar Radio. Their book is available for pre-order now.
Annika Clark was the 2020 Phoenix Youth Poet Laureate. She is a two-time National Gold Medalist in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a YoungArts Merit Winner, and an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Her work has been published in the "Best Teen Writing of 2018" and the Interlochen Review. She attends Arizona State University.
Hunter Hazelton is a poet and educator from Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a BSED in English Secondary Education from Northern Arizona University. He also completed his certificate in creative writing while studying at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Hazelton has been published by Best New Poets, Scribendi, and Storm of Blue Press, among others, and he currently co-coordinates Poetry on Roosevelt Row while teaching 9th grade English. However, he is proudest of the fact that he is still here and wants to share these moments with those around him.
Erin Kong is an interdisciplinary cultural worker whose writing and performance explore family mythology, racialized yellow as ornament, and revenge. They interrogate their diasporic Korean femininity in the west as science fiction dramedy in practice. With their background in theatre performance, poetry, and music composition, they name longing and the importance of ritual in investigating the spiritual and material. They are co-founder of Desert Diwata, and a huge fan of soup.
M. McDonough is a poet, originally from Denver, reseeded in Phoenix. Since beginning their journey in spoken word in high school, they have taken the stage in local, national, and international poetry slam competitions. While performing and writing they also cultivated a deep interest and love of community. They worked for 7 years as a poetry mentor and outreach coordinator for Denver Minor Disturbance youth poetry slam. In this role they facilitated workshops, wrote curriculum, coached performance, and supported the growth of young artists.
Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of "three women poets to watch." Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. She writes a lot about identity, the body, and the Vietnamese diaspora and also likes to make zines. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021.
Erin Jin Mei O’Malley is an Asian American writer who lives in Tempe. They have received a scholarship from the Lambda Literary Foundation and nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in wildness, Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shade Journal, and others. They are an MFA student at Arizona State University