Creative Residency 2021 Jurors:
Prose Fiction & Nonfiction

Meet the jurors who are helping us select the Prose Fiction & Nonfiction participants for the 2021 Creative Residency program.

Margaret Combs began her writing life as a National Public Radio reporter in New England and education correspondent for the Boston Globe. Her early work as a journalist and syndicated feature writer heightened awareness about student learning styles, social equity in schools and also child health. Her documentary work on children of incest was awarded the Tom Phillips New England Broadcasting Award for Best Documentary, as well as the Sigma Delta Chi Meritorious Public Service Citation. In recent years, Combs’ story-telling skills have extended to literary memoir. Her book Hazard: A Sister’s Flight from Family and a Broken Boy chronicles the emotional intricacies of growing up with a brother who has severe autism. Excerpts from her book have appeared in literary magazines, including the North American Review and Lost magazine.

Nancy Rawles is an award-winning novelist and playwright. Her novels include Love Like Gumbo, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her novel My Jim was selected by the Seattle Public Library Center for the Book for the Seattle Reads program and won an Alex Award from the American Library Association and a Legacy Award in Fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. In her New York Times review, Helen Schulman called My Jim “as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature.”

Ruby Hansen Murray is the winner of the Montana Nonfiction Prize, awarded fellowships at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, and Fishtrap. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the The Massachusetts Review, High Desert Journal, Seventh Wave, Moss, Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, Native: Voices, Indigenous American Poetry, World Literature Today, CutBank, and The Rumpus. A citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots, she received an M.F.A. from The Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in the lower Columbia River estuary.  www.rubyhansenmurray.com