It is with great excitement that we welcome the following outstanding literary citizens to our panels of judges for the 2027 Firecracker Awards.
Fiction
Donald A. Carreira Ching was born and raised in Kahaluʻu on the island of Oʻahu. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2026, his collection Blood Work and Other Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2025) was awarded the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction. He is also the author of Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2015), and his writing has appeared in Every Day Fiction, StoryQuarterly, and RHINO, among other publications. He is currently an assistant professor of writing at Leeward Community College on O’ahu.
Tina Merrill has spent much of her adult life working in independent bookstores in a variety of capacities. She is currently the bookstore manager and lead buyer at the Literary Arts Bookstore in Portland, Oregon.
Daisuke Shen is the author of Vague Predictions & Prophecies (CLASH Books, 2024), which was a finalist for the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, and Funeral (KERNPUNKT Press, 2023), coauthored with Vi Khi Nao. Their work has also appeared in 128 Lit, The Baffler, and The Cleveland Review, among other publications. They live in New York City.
Creative Nonfiction
Ariel Gore is a Lambda Literary Award–winning editor and author of thirteen books, including Rehearsals for Dying (Feminist Press, 2025), The Wayward Writer (Microcosm Publishing, 2022), Hexing the Patriarchy (Seal Press, 2019), We Were Witches (Feminist Press, 2017), The End of Eve (Hawthorne Books, 2014), and How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead (Three Rivers Press, 2007). She is the founding editor and publisher of the magazine Hip Mama, and she teaches at literarykitchen.org. Gore splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Oakland, California.
Stephen Krause is cofounder, book buyer, and a bookseller at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin, Texas. He has been in bookselling for over a decade at various shops across the country and also briefly worked at Dalkey Archive Press and The New York Review of Books. Before opening Alienated Majesty, he worked at Malvern Books in Austin, a store that stocks small-press titles and works in translation.
LaTanya McQueen is the author of the novel When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial, 2021) and the essay collection And It Begins Like This (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (2022 Fellowship in Prose) and the Elizabeth George Foundation. McQueen is an associate professor of English at NC State University where she teaches in the MFA program.
Poetry
James Fraser manages the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Bella Bennett, cofounded the press Staircase Books, which publishes individual volumes, as well as two magazines: Duck, a literary biannual, and Mark, a journal of Christian poetry.
Paige Lewis is the author of the novel Canon (Viking Press, 2026) and the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019). They coedited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books, 2023) with Kaveh Akbar. Their poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2017, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. Lewis teaches at the University of Iowa.
Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights Publishers, 2024), which received the Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry. He is the coeditor, with Brynn Saito, of The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Books, 2025).
Magazines
Karin Dibling is the proprietor of The City Reader, a newsstand in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in carrying independent magazines from around the world. Born and raised in Chicago, Dibling moved to Portland and opened the newsstand in 2013.
Sara A. Lewis is the editor in chief of Oxford American. In addition to managing the print magazine, she has contributed to OA’s online imprint, short films, photography series, and Points South podcast. She earned her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Lewis, a native Texan, currently lives and works outside Houston.
Dior J. Stephens is coeditor in chief of Foglifter Journal & Press. A Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, and Sewanee Fellow, they received their PhD in philosophy from the University of Cincinnati. Dior’s debut poetry collection, CRUEL/CRUEL (Nightboat Books, 2023), was a finalist for the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Their second collection, Atomic I, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in spring 2027.
