2021 Goldstein Contest Judges

Autumn Noelle Hall is a Rocky Mountain writer whose short form poetry has appeared internationally for more than a decade in distinguished literary journals and anthologies, garnering her a reputation for self-aware autobiography, unsparing socio-political commentary, and environmental activism. Hall served as the inaugural tanka prose editor for Ribbons from 2016 to 2018. In 2019, Atlas Poetica published her special feature, “Turn the Other Cheek: Nonviolent Resistance and Peaceful Protest Tanka.” Her collaborative book, Tanka Quartets, coauthored with long-time Ribbons editor, David C. Rice, debuted in August of 2020. Most recently, Hall was honored with first place in the 2020 Fujisan Taisho competition.

Don Miller, of Las Cruces, New Mexico, wrote his first tanka in 1982 at Purdue University in Professor Sanford Goldstein’s creative writing class. Miller then spent the next twenty years reading and studying the tanka of Goldstein and Takuboku because those were his only books of tanka. More recently his writing has been focused on family, and on border-region issues of the southwest. Miller has had his poetry published in various journals and anthologies, one of the most recent anthologies being Tanka 2020. He has guest edited two Atlas Poetica special features: “Sin Fronteras | Borders Without Boundaries” (2019) and “The Atomic Era—Seventy Years of . . .” (2015).