Curveball: Guest Judges Emma Bolden and Duane Gordon

As mentioned in the Project Verse Curveball assignment, there are two guest judges this week. One guest judge is completing the standard weekly guest judge responsibility of critiquing each poem. The second guest judge is an expert in all things Dolly Parton, and he is going to judge each poem's worthiness of being labeled a Dolly tribute poem.



Emma Bolden is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: How to Recognize a Lady, published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press' Quartet Series; The Mariner's Wife, from Finishing Line Press; and The Sad Epistles, from Dancing Girl Press. Her manuscript, Malificae, was named a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Prize; poems from the manuscript were also named a distinguished entry in the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize competition. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, The Greensboro Review, Feminist Studies, Verse, Guernica, and Redivider, as well as on Linebreak.com. Emma is a visiting assistant professor of English at Georgetown College, where she also serves as the poetry editor of the Georgetown Review. Once, she dyed her hair red just to be like Jolene. Click here to visit her blog.









T. Duane Gordon has spent more than a dozen years with the hobby of being editor and publisher of Dollymania.net: The Online Dolly Parton Newsmagazine, the oldest continually operating online resource dedicated to Dolly Parton and the Internet’s only regularly updated website about her. Content from the site has been used as source material for Country Music Television, CNN’s Larry King Live, the U.S. Library of Congress and even Dolly’s current official tour book. Three years ago, Dolly joked during a public appearance at Dollywood: “I'm sure anybody wants to know anything about me you can ask Duane. I have to call him to see what I'm gonna do next!" Duane’s formal training is in the field of journalism, and his first career was as an award-winning newspaper reporter, photographer and editor. His second career found him in the sector of nonprofit administration, where his present “day job” is executive director and CEO of the Middletown Community Foundation, a multimillion-dollar grantmaking agency. Click here to visit Dollymania.