Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in May 2004. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The New Hampshire Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, The Indiana Review, The Electronic Book Review, Western Humanities Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer's Chronicle, among other publications, including two anthologies of contemporary poetry. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, the Asia Society, Artspace, University of Virginia, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, has served on panels at UCLA, Poet's House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore and Vancouver, been a commentator for NPR, KKUP and Wesleyan radio and been featured in the Hartford Courant, The New Britain Herald and in the Shoreline Press. He reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an interview with him at Jacket Magazine. As a youth, he was once forced to conjure silken scarves from an empty hat as his father's, Sam the Super's, magician's apprentice.

Previous Judges
Frank Wilson, Sarah Crown, and Dave Brinks