2025 MCPL Judge Shawn R. Jones

2025 MCPL Judge Shawn R. Jones

Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She is a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and her poetry collection, Date of Birth, has won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of two...

2024 MCPL Judge Trapeta Mayson

Poet, community arts practitioner, founder of the Healing Verse Poetry Line and co-administrator of “ConsenSIS” a year long project to survey, gather, and memorialize Black women poets in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas. Mayson was born in Liberia and raised in...
Announcement of the 2024 MCYPL Finalists

Announcement of the 2024 MCYPL Finalists

On March 25th, the five finalists for the 2024 Montgomery County Youth Poet Laureate were announced! Congratulations to Emi Maeda of The Baldwin School, Maya Brothers of Friends’ Central School, Samrithaa H.V. of Methacton Senior High School, Sofia Bagarazzi of...

2024 MCYPL Judge Michelle Taransky

Michelle Taransky teaches professional, creative and academic writing at Penn.  Taransky received a BA in English with honors from The University of Chicago and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. The author of Sorry Was In...
2023 Celebrity Judge – Gilad Jaffe

2023 Celebrity Judge – Gilad Jaffe

Gilad Jaffe is an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from New York City, he holds a BA in Written Arts from Bard College where he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in...