Gena E. Chandler and Andrew Krivák to Serve as Guest Judges for The Chautauqua Prize

Chautauqua Institution proudly announces the 2025 guest judges and jury for The Chautauqua Prize. 

Awarded annually since 2012, the Prize celebrates a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. New this year, the Prize also accepted nominations of full-length poetry collections for consideration. Books published in 2024 were accepted as submissions for the 2025 Prize from September to December 2024. The 2025 Prize finalists and award-winning book will be selected from a long list of 394 entries read and reviewed by 118 volunteer Chautauquans who are writers, publishers, educators, editors, librarians, and avid readers. This year, the Institution is honored to share that the Prize jury will include two guest judges: award-winning writer Andrew Krivák and renowned literary scholar Gena E. Chandler.  

Gena E. Chandler is an associate professor and associate chair for the department of English at Virginia Tech, where she has been honored with the 2015 Virginia Tech Certificate of Teaching Excellence Award, the 2015 College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Carroll B. Shannon Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2007 Diggs Teaching Scholar Award for teaching excellence. 

Chandler’s research interests include African American literature, American literature, postcolonial literature, pedagogy, and critical literary theory. 

She has published articles on the work of Charles Johnson, including a piece in Texas Studies in Literature and Language and a piece in the edited collection Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher (2007). Her recent publications include an article in the journal Pedagogy (“Threat Assessment: Women of Color Teaching Ideological Critique in the Neoliberal Classroom”), and her book The Wanderer in African American Literature was published in 2020 by The University of Tennessee Press. 

Andrew Krivák is the author of four novels, two chapbooks of poetry, and two works of nonfiction. His 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction, as well as the winner of the inaugural Chautauqua Prize. He followed The Sojourn with The Signal Flame (2017), a novel The New York Times said evoked “an austere landscape, a struggling family, and a deep source of pain” in Krivák’s fictional Dardan, Pennsylvania. His third novel, The Bear (2020), received the Banff Mountain Book Prize for fiction and is a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title. His most recent novel, Like the Appearance of Horses (2023), returns to the characters and landscape of Dardan. 

As a poet, Krivák has published the chapbooks Islands (1999) and Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves (2021). He is also author of the memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (2008) and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902–1912 (2009), which won the Louis Martz Prize for scholarly research on William Carlos Williams. 

He holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Columbia University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham, and a doctorate in literary modernism from Rutgers University. Krivák lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire. He is Visiting Lecturer on English at Harvard University. 

Krivák and Chandler will be featured within the Masters Series programming during this year’s Summer Assembly. 

They join our jury of readers in the selection process for The Chautauqua Prize, including Kwame Alexander, the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts; Stephine Hunt, Managing Director of Literary Arts; Sara Toth, editor of The Chautauquan Daily; Emily Carpenter, Prize administrator and Department of Education coordinator; and Jordan Steves, Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education. 

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, producer and the No. 1 New York Times best-selling author of 40 books including This Is the Honey; Why Fathers Cry at Night; An American Story; The Door of No Return; Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson); Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal; and The Undefeated, a National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 

Alexander is also the executive producer, showrunner, and Emmy-winning writer of “The Crossover” TV series, based on his Newbery Medal-winning novel of the same name, which premiered on Disney+ in April 2023. The series was produced in partnership with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company and Big Sea Entertainment, Alexander’s production company that is dedicated to creating innovative, highly original children’s and family entertainment. Other current projects in development at Big Sea include “America’s Next Great Author,” the groundbreaking reality television series for writers. 

A regular contributor to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Alexander is the creator and host of the “Why Fathers Cry” podcast, premiering September 2023, featuring conversations about love, parenting and loss with fathers and sons. He regularly shares his passion for literacy, books and the craft of writing around the world at events like the Chautauqua Lecture Series, the Edinburgh Book Festival, Aspen Ideas, and the Global Literacy Symposium in Ghana, where he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic. Most recently he was appointed the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Writer-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution.  

His mission is to change the world, one word at a time. 

Managing Director of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt assists the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts in the design and implementation of initiatives to strengthen and deepen the value of the literary arts at Chautauqua Institution. She provides administrative leadership for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, the annual Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference, the literary journal Chautauqua, and two national literary prizes (The Chautauqua Prize and the Chautauqua Janus Prize). She works collaboratively with other colleagues on school-based programs, such as the CLSC Young Readers, Battle of the Books, and the interactive Poetry Makerspace. Prior to her appointment as manager of literary arts in 2023, Hunt served the Institution as the CLSC Octagon Manager since 2017.  

Hunt is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in American Studies at the University at Buffalo and is an adjunct instructor of English and ethnic and gender studies at the State University of New York, Fredonia. Her areas of expertise include critical Indigenous studies, Native American history and literature, and the environmental humanities. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English and history at Alfred University and her master’s degree in English at SUNY Fredonia. 

Sara Toth works in the Department of Education and in the Department of Marketing and Communications at Chautauqua Institution. During Chautauqua’s Summer Assembly season, she serves as editor of The Chautauquan Daily, a newspaper first established in 1876 as the official newspaper and archival paper of record of the Institution. There, she oversees a team of 24 college student interns who write, edit, photograph and design the Daily for the Chautauqua readership. In the Department of Education, she serves as lecture associate, assisting in researching, planning and programming the Chautauqua Lecture Series. She joined the year-round, full-time staff at the Institution in 2014 after working for several years as a community and education reporter for a collection of newspapers in the Baltimore Sun Media Group. She is a graduate of Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature. 

Emily Carpenter works in the Department of Education at Chautauqua Institution as department coordinator. In her current role, she works as administrator of The Chautauqua Prize, lecture assistant and assistant archivist, among other responsibilities. Prior to working in the Department of Education, Carpenter taught in various local school districts, tutored local middle school students, and was night auditor at the Chautauqua Bookstore. Carpenter received her master’s degree in American History from American Military University and bachelor’s degrees in social studies education and history from the State University of New York, Fredonia. 

As Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education at Chautauqua Institution, Jordan Steves manages and provides leadership for the iconic Chautauqua Lecture Series, Chautauqua’s signature program presented each weekday morning of its Summer Assembly on the historic Amphitheater platform, and also oversee the Chautauqua Literary Arts (including the legacy of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle), the beloved Smith Memorial Library, the Chautauqua Institution Archives, plus additional engagements such as townhalls, roundtables, masterclasses and partnerships. Steves began at Chautauqua full-time in 2009, first as the lecture associate within the Department of Education before moving to the Department of Marketing and Communications in 2014 as director of communications. His first Chautauqua experience was in 2007 as an intern with The Chautauquan Daily. He later had the privilege to serve as the newspaper’s editor from 2014 to 2017. 

The Chautauqua Prize, which will be awarded for the 14th time this year, has been inspired since its inception by the late literary and entertainment industry attorney Michael I. Rudell, and his wife, Alice. Previous winners include The Sojourn, by Andrew Krivák (2012); Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, by Timothy Egan (2013); My Foreign Cities, by Elizabeth Scarboro (2014); Redeployment, by Phil Klay (2015); Off the Radar, by Cyrus Copeland (2016); The Fortunes, by Peter Ho Davies (2017); The Fact of a Body, by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich (2018); All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva (2019); Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah (2020); Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss (2021); All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner (2022); Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2023); and The Reformatory: A Novel by Tananarive Due (2024).  

Winners of The Chautauqua Prize are noteworthy for their capacity to open inquiry and create an inviting space for conversation among many different kinds of readers, making the books an ideal vehicle to engage in Chautauqua Institution’s historic tradition of reading and discussion in community. Chautauqua’s other annual literary award, the Chautauqua Janus Prize, celebrates experimental writers who have not yet published a book. Taken together, these prizes ensure that both tradition and innovation live at the heart of a Chautauqua reader’s life of learning.  

ABOUT THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE  
Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize draws upon Chautauqua Institution’s considerable literary legacy to celebrate a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. The author of the winning book will receive $7,500 and will participate in a Prize ceremony and reading on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution during the 2025 Summer Assembly Season. For more information, visit prize.chq.org.   

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY ARTS  
With a history steeped in the literary arts, Chautauqua Institution is the home of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, which honors at least nine outstanding books of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry with community discussions and author presentations every summer. Further literary arts programs at Chautauqua include the Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference — previously known as the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, which annually convenes writers in workshops, panels, and other conversations that draw fruitful and urgent connections between the personal, the political and the craft of writing — as well as the summer-long workshops, craft lectures and readings from some of the very best author-educators in North America at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. Chautauqua Literary Arts is supported by the Managing Director of Literary Arts and led by the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of the Literary Arts, an endowed chair established in memory of a beloved Chautauquan who, among other things, inspired Chautauqua’s first literary award, The Chautauqua Prize.   

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION  
Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer — and year-round through the CHQ Assembly online platforms — with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue.