About
The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Judges
Amity Gaige
Amity Gaige is the author of four novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife (Knopf, April 2020). Amity is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, and fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. The longtime Visiting Writer at Amherst College, she now teaches creative writing at Yale. Her short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Die Welt, Harper’s Bazaar, The Yale Review, Slate.com, One Story, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She currently lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut. She had to learn to sail in order to write Sea Wife. She learned that she is not a gifted sailor, so she will stick to writing about it.
Dan Pope
Dan Pope is a 2002 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has published two novels, In the Cherry Tree (Picador, 2003) and Housebreaking (Simon & Schuster, 2015). His novel in progress is under contact with Einaudi | Gruppo Mondadori. His short stories have appeared in numerous print journals, recently in Bellevue Review, “Bon Voyage Charlie,” which was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Other stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, McSweeneys, Iowa Review, The Bellevue Review, The Bennington Review, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, Witness, Post Road, Crazyhorse, Fields, The Greensboro Review, as well as many anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2007 (Harcourt) and the Pushcart Prize Anthology (2020).
Dawnie Walton
Dawnie Walton is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Audie Award for Fiction. Her debut novel was also longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and former U.S. President Barack Obama. She is the cofounder and editorial director of Ursa, an audio production company celebrating short fiction from underrepresented voices, and is the cohost of its accompanying podcast. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Tin House, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she has taught a fiction seminar). Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband.
Lawrence Howe
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.
Rand Richards Cooper
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.