The Judges

Mike Heppner is the author of two novels, "The Egg Code" (Knopf, 2002) and "Pike's Folly" (Knopf, 2006). His writing has also appeared in Esquire Online and Nerve.com. "The Egg Code" was named by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly to their "Best of the Year" lists and was nominated for a Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award. "Pike's Folly" was praised by Publishers Weekly for its "… haunting and redemptive vision of New England's past and present," and by Esquire for its "… breezy black humor that cloaks a biting satire." He lives in Belmont, Mass., and teaches creative writing at Emerson College. A third novel is forthcoming.

His comments on judging the 2007 S.C. Fiction Project:

"I was very pleased and honored to be asked to help judge this year's South Carolina Fiction Project. Having grown up in the Midwest and lived on and off in New England, these stories offered me a window into a region and culture as diverse as it is indelible. Reading them, laughing with them, sometimes being hushed into silence by what they convey, I learned something about my country. I learned that we're thinking a lot about death — family, too. We're perplexed about race and taking solace in the strange. God's on our minds, but not always in the same ways and for the same reasons. We're getting married, then realizing we don't know enough about ourselves, let alone the other person. We're remembering who we were a half-century ago and trying to infer something about our present from our past. We're fighting with our words and our fists, both times gaining little in process. We're learning more from our students than they're learning from us. We're going to work, to church, to school — who knows, maybe just to hell, each in our own ways. We're failing at a lot of things and succeeding at some. And we're writing about it, too. Thank God for that."

Ellen Litman is the author of "The Last Chicken in America," a novel in stories. Her stories have appeared in Best New American Voices 2007, Best of Tin House, Ontario Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares and other magazines. Her fiction won first prize in the Atlantic Monthly 2003 Fiction Contest, and she's been awarded the 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, as well as fiction fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and now teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut.

Her comments on judging the 2007 S.C. Fiction Project:

"First of all, I want to say what a joy and honor it was to judge this contest. So much talent! Such different stories! Thinking of the final selections, I find it hard to talk of them in general terms. Each winning story has charmed me in its own way. Some are traditional in their style, while others are more structurally daring. Some grapple with serious and even tragic matters, while others are lighthearted — though in the end, no less poignant. What brings them together in the first place, is the beauty of their language, the voices that captivate us, the sentences that glitter on the page and take our breath away. They bring to mind the best of Southern writing - Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Barry Hannah. The stories feature some unforgettable characters - an ambivalent father, a neglected teenage girl, a couple of college professors, a rebellious deacon, a man who is obsessed with reading bumper stickers - and each is developed with a great degree of compassion and nuance. But they don't exist in a vacuum either. I was struck by how lovingly these stories evoked the worlds and cultures their characters inhabit. We visit a retirement home and a textile mill. There is a college town haunted by a murder, a downtown street in the '50s, a hunting trip. Each story is a journey. These are the worlds we might not encounter in our day-to-day lives, but the stories make them alive and real, and we are the richer for having experienced them."

Christine W. Randall is assistant features editor of The Post and Courier and has been coordinating the S.C. Fiction Project with the S.C. Arts Commission since 1994.