As past panelists for the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, Traci Brimhall, Melissa Faliveno, and Tanya Rey share what it was like to read and judge applications. They discuss what made an application stand out, how writers can craft the narrative and philosophy statements to good effect, the importance of submitting polished work, the inherent subjectivity of the process, persistence in the face of rejection, and more.

About the Panelists:

Traci Brimhall's fifth poetry collection, Love Prodigal, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She is also the author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Her children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, was published by SeedStar Books in March 2017.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her writing has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Literary Hub, Ms Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Prairie Schooner, and in the anthology Sex and The Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022).

Tanya Rey is a queer Cuban-American writer whose work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, The Sun, Roads & Kingdoms, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Georgia Review, and Catapult, among others. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships from The Georgia Review, Rona Jaffe Foundation, San Francisco Writers Grotto, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, UCross, Blue Mountain Center, I-Park, and others. Rey has worked as managing editor for One Story and fiction editor for Epiphany and has taught creative writing at New York University and Writing Pad in San Francisco.

Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and a transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email [email protected] (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Twitter or on Facebook.