Cuyahoga Community CollegeJudges & Prizes
Judges
Karen Schubert is the author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing) and five chapbooks including Dear Youngstown (NightBallet Press) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State University Press). Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in New World Writing, Read+Write: 30 Days of Poetry; 21st Century Plague: Poems and Prose for a Pandemic; Ohio Poetry Association Common Threads; and Raw Data: Living In the Fallout from the Coronavirus. Her awards include a Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is Founding Director of Lit Youngstown.
Santanna Watson was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember. During recent years, he has developed an interest in the history of various art cultures. He is strongly inspired and fascinated by the old masters of the Renaissance period due to the subject matter, emotion, and physical anguish that was expressed in their works. This fascination has led him to the practice of a variety of art styles and techniques such as contemporary, surrealism, still life, relief sculptures, and work-studies of Renaissance art.
His style of art is an attempt to allow the viewer to peruse his realm of imagination as expressed on canvas. In his opinion, art is the perception of one's own reality transformed through thought, vision, and emotion. He believes art has the power to inspire, overwhelm, and challenge the human mind. Therefore, in his paintings he endeavors to provoke the viewer to suggest the theory behind his creations.
Clevelander Daniel Brown is a co-founder of Rust Belt Riders, an organization dedicated to transforming food systems through the creation of products derived from discarded food. He is among 34 social entrepreneurs worldwide who have been selected by the global nonprofit Echoing Green for 2019 fellowships.
Brown has served on the Cleveland-Cuyahoga Food Policy Coalition, the Cuyahoga County Next Generation Council, and the U.S. Composting Council's steering committee for community composting. He's a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied ethics.
Finalists
Performance Finalists
Hailey Gray: An Unlikely Meeting
Davyon Rose: Beyond Hope
Maxwell Sloan: What’s to Come of What’s Unknown
Media Finalists
Patrick Connolly: “CarlQuest”
Mark Flanagan: “An Absolutely Terrible Girlfriend”
Rema Alsabony & Noora Farraj
Creative Writing Finalists
John Sara: “On the Topic of Their Arrival”
Laura Wentling: How to Build and Maintain a Famous Online Persona: A Six Step Guide
Matthew Morales: My Life with Carl: A Memoir & Manifesto
Academic Finalists
Evangelina Gregg: “Losing Control”
Matthew Purgai: “Can We Trust April as a Narrator?”
Zachary Duwe: “An Absolutely Unreliable Narrator”
Visual Finalists
Gena Asi: “Tied Painting”
Andrew Cooper: “Carl’s Hand”
Brandon Hrnja: “April May’s Theory of Tiered Fame”
Culinary Finalists
Michelle Orr
Antonia Philpot
Desirae Kaim
Debbie Sisson
Bill Greenwood