2008 Fiction Judges

Geoffrey Burn
Geoffrey Burn has spent the last 25 years as a chief executive of groups of publishing companies in Britain, Germany, the US, and Canada. In this role, he has seen several thousand books and journal issues into print. In addition, he has been a strategy consultant for the publishing divisions of a variety of commercial and non-profit organizations. He has a particular interest in educating young publishers, and was the founding program director for academic and professional publishing courses at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada. He has also served as a faculty member and curriculum advisor on the Stanford Professional Publishing Courses. In addition, he has a strong interest in seeing publishing flourish in the developing world, and he has helped launch startup companies in a dozen countries. Based on this experience, he has run workshops on the underlying development model for a variety of non-profit organizations. He holds a PhD in organizational theory and strategy, and is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, the Institute of Directors, and the Inter University Seminar on the Armed Forces and Society. He is currently the Director of Stanford University Press.

Bo Caldwell
Bo Caldwell was born in Oklahoma City in 1955. She grew up in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where she later held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing and a Jones Lectureship in Creative Writing. She has received a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council of Santa Clara County, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Her personal essays have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and America Magazine, and her short stories have been included in Story, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other literary journals. Her novel, The Distant Land of My Father, was published in hardcover by Chronicle Books in October of 2001 and in paperback by Harcourt in September of 2002. The book was a national bestseller, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, and a Booksense 76 pick. It was also chosen as Pasadena's book for its city-wide reading program, " One City, One Story" in 2007, and for Santa Clara County's program, Silicon Valley Reads, for 2008. Foreign rights were sold to the U.K., the Netherlands, France, and Italy. She lives in Northern California.

Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University, and teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, and (by affiliation) of German Studies, Modern Thought and Literature, and Spanish & Portuguese. He is also Professeur Associé in the Département de Littérature Comparée at the Université de Montréal, Directeur d’études associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Professeur attaché au Collège de France. Gumbrecht was born in Würzburg, Germany, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz. At the University of Siegen, he founded the first Humanities Graduate Program (Graduiertenkolleg) in Germany (dedicated to the topic "Kommunikationsformen als Lebensformen"). His main areas of teaching and research are the histories of French, Spanish, and Italian literatures (especially the Middle Ages, the 18th century, and the first half of the 20th century); the history of Literary Criticism and of the Humanities; and the history of western thought since its classical origins. His over one thousand publications (translated into more than twenty languages) include a History of Spanish Literature, a chronicle of the year 1926, and monographs on medieval narrative, rhetoric in the French Revolution, Zola, “Presence,” Philology, and on the Aesthetics of Sport. Gumbrecht’s most recent book-publications in English are: In 1926 – Living at the Edge of Time, The Powers of Philology, Production of Presence, and In Praise of Athletic Beauty.

2008 Nonfiction Judges

Keith Devlin
Keith Devlin is a Senior Researcher and Executive Director at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, and a co-founder of both the Stanford Media X research network and of the university's H-STAR institute. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences, and he also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 26 books and over 75 published research articles, and has been awarded the 2001 Communications Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, the 2003 Peano Prize, the 2005 Pythagoras Prize, and the 2007 Carl Sagan Award. He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio.

Ginger Rhodes
Ginger Rhodes is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in trauma treatment. She received her PhD from the University of Connecticut. Her practice includes psychological evaluation of trauma survivors seeking political asylum in the United States. Her research interests include understanding violence; she developed a psychological scale for measuring violent socialization. She has presented workshops and papers on violence and trauma treatment both in the United States and abroad. Prior to becoming a psychologist, Dr. Rhodes was a journalist and producer for public radio. She and her husband, Richard Rhodes, share many years of experience in writing and editing, and co-edited the book Trying To Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph Over Childhood Abuse.

Richard Rhodes
Richard Rhodes is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the author of more than twenty books. His most recent publication is a third volume of nuclear history, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, which examines the international politics of nuclear weapons across the past two decades. His other works include The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in history; Why They Kill, an investigation of the roots of private violence; A Hole in the World, a personal memoir; Farm, a chronicle of American farm life; a biography, John James Audubon: The Making of an American; and four novels. He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT; and has served as a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series.

Hank Saroyan
Hank Saroyan’s thirty-five year career in entertainment has run the gamut from performing, to writing, producing, directing, and composing for television and features. He is one of few directors with Emmy Awards for directing in live-action (William Saroyan’s The Parsley Garden) and animation (Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies). He is currently producing Who Are Those Guys? an original, six-hour series highlighting the poignant and often amusing remembrances of major sports officials, starting with the Umpires of Major League Baseball. He is also set to shoot Justin of Idaho, a romantic comedy co-written by him, in the winter of 2008. Between projects, Hank can be found on stage performing A Tribute to William Saroyan--In His Own Words, accompanied by renowned jazz and classical musicians such as cellist, Eugene Friesen, pianist, Philip Aaberg and others. Kevin Starr, friend of William Saroyan and Professor of History at University of Southern California, wrote: “There is music in the prose of William Saroyan and his nephew Hank Saroyan and his colleagues are now releasing that music with new intensity through a magic amalgam of musical artistry and the spoken word. William Saroyan now speaks to us, once again, with the full force of his living presence.”

2005 Judges

Eavan Boland
Steve Leveen
Geoffrey Nunberg
Burt Prelutsky
Ginger Rhodes
Richard Rhodes
Hank Saroyan


2003 Judges

Eavan Boland
Geoffrey Nunberg
Hank Saroyan
Alberto Vitale