Judy
Loest earned her M.A. in English from the University of Tennessee in
1998 with a Creative Writing thesis of poetry and short fiction. Since
then she has won several poetry awards including the Libba Moore Gray Poetry
Prize, Special Merit in the League of American Penwomen's Soul-Making Literary
Contest, and the Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize at the 2000 Indiana University
Writers' Conference.Her poetry has appeared in Now & Then
, Guild anthologies All Around Us: Poems from the Valley
and Breathing the Same Air, and recently in The Cortland
Review (http://www.cortlandreview.com).
As a Knoxville Writers' Guild Board member, Judy serves as Programs coordinator and on the Peter Taylor Prize committee. She also serves on the Board of the Friends of the Knox County Public Library and has helped with theLibrary's annual used book sale for the past seven years. Judy was born in Snowflake,VA,a true Appalachian native of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent who spent her first seven years in a "holler" and credits any talent she has a writer to that early and close relationship to Nature.
