The 2025 Firecracker Awards Judges

Luis Alberto Correa is the general manager at White Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Previously he was operations manager at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. He has served as a member of the American Bookseller Association (ABA) committee on diversity, equity, and inclusion; chair for ABA’s Indies Introduce; a juror for the US Republic of Consciousness Prize; and a juror for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

Juliana Lamy is the author of You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Firecracker Award in fiction, given by CLMP. She received a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard College, where she won the Harvard University Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize and the Gordon Parks Essay Prize for Nonfiction. Lamy also received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in South Florida, where she was raised after immigrating with her family from Haiti.

Alejandro Varela is the author of the debut novel, The Town of Babylon (Astra House, 2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. His work has appeared in Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Offing, The Point, and The Yale Review, among other publications. Varela holds a masters in public health from the University of Washington. He is currently a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.

Sean Enfield is an essayist, poet, gardener, bassist, and educator from Dallas, Texas. His debut essay collection, Holy American Burnout!, was published by Split/Lip Press in December 2023, won the Texas Book Awards’ Discovery Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in creative nonfiction. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin and the assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. He received his MFA from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he served as the editor-in-chief of Permafrost.

Rosa Hernandez is the marketing manager at Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington. She has been a bookseller for almost ten years, and currently serves on the board of directors of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Previously, she served on the American Booksellers Association’s committee on diversity, equity, and inclusion; as a juror for the Pacific Northwest Book Award; and as a juror for the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer, and translator. She is the author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration (Astra House, 2024), winner of the 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and her writing has also been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020. She is the recipient of an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship, and, in Spring 2022, she was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow.

Rob Arnold is a CHamoru poet, essayist, and arts leader with two decades of experience advancing equity in publishing and nonprofit spaces, a passion he carries into his current role as executive director of Poets House in New York City. Previously, he cofounded Memorious and worked with Ploughshares, Fence Books, Beacon Press, PEN New England, Aevitas Creative Management, and Hugo House. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Harpur Palate, Hyphen, Poetry Northwest, RED INK, and Solstice, and has been anthologized in New CHamoru Literature and Na’huyong: An Anthology of CHamoru Literature.

Truong Tran is a poet, artist, and teacher living and practicing in San Francisco. He is the author of the collection book of the other: small in comparison, published by Kaya Press in 2021 and recipient of the 2022 Firecracker Award in poetry, given by CLMP. His other books include the poetry collections The Book of Perceptions (Kearney Street Workshop, 1999); Placing the Accents (1999), Dust and Conscience (2002), Within The Margin (2004), Four Letter Words (2008), all published by Apogee Press; and 100 Words, coauthored with Damon Potter (Omnidawn, 2021).

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a Palestinian poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three books—Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in poetry; and Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. Tuffaha was also curator and translator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine published by The Baffler. Awards and recognition of her work include a 2020 Best of the Net for nonfiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize, the Goldstein Prize for Poetry, and a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship.

Amy Brady is the former executive director and publisher of Orion Magazine. She is also the author of Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023), named a best book of 2023 by NPR and Scientific American. Brady has made appearances on the BBC, NPR, and PBS. She holds a PhD in literature and American studies and has won writing and research awards from the National Science Foundation, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Library of Congress.

Alexandra Watson is a multiracial fiction writer and poet from Syracuse, New York. She is the executive editor of Apogee Journal, which won the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and the 2023 Platinum Review Award for Excellence in Literary Magazine Publishing, given by CLMP. In 2019, she received the 2019 PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Magazine Editing.  Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, The Common, Nat. Brut., The Nation, The Offing, The Rumpus, The South Carolina Review, and other publications. She is a senior lecturer at Barnard College, where she founded the creative writing fellows program and the Cite Black Barnard Faculty Initiative. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Oscar Villalon is the editor of ZYZZYVA, a recipient of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. His work has been published in several publications, including Alta, The Believer, Stranger’s Guide, and Lit Hub, where he is a contributing editor. He lives in San Francisco.