Wisconsin People & Ideas 2020 Fiction and Poetry Contest Reading

Jacquelyn Thomas is the first-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. She recently returned to the Driftless Area, after living more than thirty years in a Madison housing project where she served as director of an on-site community learning center. Her nonfiction work has been published by Proximity Magazine and is forthcoming in the spring issue of Fourth Genre as runner-up in the Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest.

Jennifer Morales is the second-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. She is a poet, fiction writer, and performance artist based in rural Wisconsin. Morales lived in Milwaukee for over twenty years, and served as the city’s first elected Latinx school board member. She’s also been a mom, a doula, a Sunday School teacher, a grantwriter, and an editor for academic and artistic clients around the world. Her short story collection, Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories (UW Press, 2015), was Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 “Book of the Year.” Recent publications include “Cousins,” a short story in Milwaukee Noir  and “The Boy Without a Bike” in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Morales is the president of the board of the Driftless Writing Center in Viroqua.

Barbara Kriegsmann is the third-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. A former pharmaceutical executive. Among the functions she directed in her career were strategic planning, product management, marketing research and advertising. In the early 1990s, she was instrumental in the establishment of the Society for the Advancement of Women's Health Research, which continues to be a crucial influence in studying and developing drugs to benefit women. Kriegsmann and her husband have two sons who now have their own families and continue to make her proud. Home is now Washington Island, which provides great neighbors, treasured friends, and a beautiful refuge for writing.

Susan Martell Huebner is the first-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest. Her poetry has appeared many times in several formats, the most recent being in the anthology Leaves of Peace, published by The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and her chapbook Reality Changes with the Willy Nilly Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She has an essay in Re-Creating Our Common Chord (Wising Up Press, 2019) and was in the middle of promoting this much needed anthology when COVID19 rounded the corner. Huebner lives in Mukwonago with her husband and two cats, one skinny and one not.

Kathryn Gahl is the second-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in many journals and several anthologies and have won awards from Glimmer Train, Margie, and Wisconsin People & Ideas, as well as the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. Gahl's most recent release is The Velocity of Love, a poetic memoir. When not playing with words, cooking, or yielding to yoga, Gahl dances red-hot ballroom.

Dominic W. Holt is the third-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest. He is a poet and macro social worker (public policy and outreach) in Madison, Wisconsin. Holt taught writing at the University of Michigan, interned at the Michigan Quarterly Review, and received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in Creative Writing from the U.S. Department of Education. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a Master of Social Work in social policy from the University of Michigan, and a BS in astrophysics from Indiana University. His work has appeared in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Lunch Ticket, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, Plainsongs, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Driftwood Review, Lifeboat, Poetry Quarterly, and other venues.