2025 Panel of Judges

2025 Panel of Judges

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Panel of Judges 2025

Alice McDermott

Esmeralda Santiago

Lawrence Howe

Phil Klay

Rand Richards Cooper

For more information, contact Omar Acevedo at omar.acevedo@marktwainhouse.org.

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Meet the Judges

  • Esmeralda Santiago is the author of three groundbreaking memoirs;  When I was Puerto Rican and Almost A Woman, which she adapted into a Peabody Award-winning movie for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, and The Turkish Lover. Her novels include America’s Dream, the national best seller Conquistadora, and Las Madres. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Esmeralda lives with her husband documentary filmmaker Frank Cantor in Westchester County, New York.

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  • Alice McDermott’s latest novel, Absolution, was an instant NY Times bestseller, winner of the 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and named one of the best books of 2023 by Time, NPR, LA Times, Vogue, Esquire and others.  Her eight previous novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Award. Her novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction. The Ninth Hour received France’s Prix Femina Étranger. She is also the author of an essay collection, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, Commonweal, Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. For two decades, she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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  • Lawrence Howe is Professor emeritus of English and Film Studies at Roosevelt University. He is the author of Mark Twain and the Novel: the Double-Cross of Authority (Cambridge UP) and co-edited and contributed to Mark Twain and Money (U of Alabama Press) and Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses (Scarecrow Press). A former president of the Mark Twain Circle of America, Howe is on the advisory board of The Mark Twain Annual and is editor emeritus of Studies in American Humor. He was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark and has lectured throughout Europe and North America on topics in American culture, especially Mark Twain.

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  • Rand Richards Cooper is the author of two works of fiction, The Last to Go and Big As Life. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and in Best American Short Stories. He has been Writer-in-Residence at Amherst and Emerson colleges. A longtime contributor to Bon Appétit and the New York Times, Rand lives in Hartford, CT with his family. He is the restaurant critic for the Hartford Courant and has been a critic and essayist for Commonweal for over two decades. The Last to Go was produced for television by ABC.

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  • Phil Klay is a novelist and essayist. His short story collection, Redeployment, received the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. He teaches creative writing at Fairfield University.