2006 BLR Literary Prize Judges

Poetry: Edward Hirsch has published six books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers, WildGratitude ( which won the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Night Parade, Earthly Measures, On Love, and Lay Back the Darkness. He has also written three prose books: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, Responsive Reading, and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. He is the editor of Transforming Vision: Writers on Artand co-editor of A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations. He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He taught for eighteen years at the University of Houston, and is now the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Nonfiction: Abraham Verghese is the Director of The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and he is Marvin Forland Distinguished Professor of Medicine. In 1990-91, Dr. Verghese attended the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree. His first book, My Own Country, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie. His second book, The Tennis Partner, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller. He has been the commencement speaker at many medical schools and has an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Swarthmore College. He has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere.