Linda's chapbook, Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk, received an honorable mention in the Poetry Council of North Carolna's 2007 OSCAR ARNOLD YOUNG AWARD.

Other recipients in the honorable mention category were Mark Smith-Soto, Susan Meyers, and Ann Campanella. The winner was Alex Grant. Judge: Stephen Gardner, University of South Carolina Aiken

Formerly a magazine and newspaper editor, Ann Campanella turned to creative writing because of the need to focus on things that moved her. Twice, she has received the Poet Laureate Award, the highest honor of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poetry was selected for the Blumenthal Readers & Writers Series by the North Carolina Writers' Network. Her writing, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Main Street Rag, has appeared in local and national publications and anthologies including Chelsea, Crucible, Earth and Soul, Iodine Poetry Journal, Iris, Kakalak, Pembroke, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and many others. Campanella has a degree in English Literature from Davidson College in North Carolina and lives with her husband, daughter and animals on a small horse farm in Huntersville, North Carolina.

Mark Smith-Soto is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he now serves as director of the new Center for Creative Writing in the Arts and edits International Poetry Review. Winner of a 2005 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, his work has appeared in various publications, including Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, Quarterly West and Kenyon Review. Two of his chapbooks, Green Mango Collage and Shafts, won prizes and publication from the North Carolina Writers' Network, and his first full-length collection, Our Lives Are Rivers (University of Florida Press 2003), was runner-up for the Best North Carolina Poetry Book of the Year award, offered by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. His most recent collection, Any Second Now, was published by Main Street Rag Press in March 2006. Several of his one-act plays have been produced by the Greensboro Playwrights Forum, and his verse play, “Trio from the Holocaust Museum," was published by Dramatic Publishing of Chicago in 2005.
 

Susan Meyers is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press) and Lessons in Leaving, a chapbook selected by Brendan Galvin for the 1998 Persephone Press Book Award. She is the winner of the SIBA Award for her book, Keep and Give Away. Click here: Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance - Home   Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Tar River Poetry and have been featured online at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A longtime writing instructor, she holds an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte. Meyers grew up in North Carolina and currently lives in Givhans, South Carolina, near Summerville.

 

Alex Grant is a native Scot now living in N.C. He was the 2004 winner of WMSU's Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, the 2006 winner of the Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest, and has been finalist or runner-up for Tupelo Press's Dorset Prize, The Felix Pollak and Brittingham Prizes, Discovery/The Nation, Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, The Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize and The Writers at Work Fellowship, among others. His ms., Fear of Moving Water was 1 of 6 finalists for the Hillhead House's 2006 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook contest, and he has twice been a nominated finalist for Meridian's Best New Poets anthology. His work has recently appeared or is upcoming in The Nation, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Eleventh Muse, Sycamore Review and Poetry Southeast, among others. He works up and down the eastern seaboard for a not-for-profit healthcare organization, whose address you can read by the moon, and divides his personal time between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where he lives with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess