Meet Our Judges!

By Halie Rosenberg

Contrary to popular belief, Duchess Willemina Pennington will not be judging the entries to this year's High Desert Retreat Scholarship Competition. Instead, we are proud to introduce you to our very esteemed and completely impartial panel of judges. Behold our marvelous panel! They will determine whose writing submission will win the full scholarship to the retreat (cue the music)!

Joe Donnelly is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. Donnelly was the deputy editor of the L.A. Weekly from 2002 to 2008. Before that, Donnelly was the arts editor of New Times Los Angeles and editor in chief of the seminal Los Angeles pop-culture magazine Bikini. Most recently Donnelly, along with Laurie Ochoa, launched Slake Los Angeles, the bestselling quarterly journal.



Judy Reeves is a writer, teacher, and writing practice provocateur. Her books include A Writer's Book of Days (10th Anniversary Revised Edition released this fall); Writing Alone, Writing Together; A Creative Writer's Kit and The Writer’s Retreat Kit. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the San Diego Reader and Personal Journaling magazine. Judy teaches creative writing at UCSD Extension and The Ink Spot. She is a co-founder of San Diego Writers, Ink, where she served as Executive Director.



Ron Koertge writes fiction for Young Adults and poetry for everybody. He won multiple ALA awards for YA fiction. He also received the P.E.N. prize for his book Stoner and Spaz, a N.E.A. fellowship for poetry, and his poetry has been included twice in The Best American Poetry. His latest YA is Shakespeare Makes The Playoffs (Candlewick Press). His latest books of poetry are Fever (Red Hen Press) and Indigo (Red Hen Press).



Michael Kramer broke into TV as a freelance writer for Nickelodeon's animated series Rugrats. He has written for several animated series, including Disney's Recess, Starship Troopers, and ABC Family's Angela Anaconda, garnering an Emmy nomination in the process. Since then, Michael has written on prime time sitcoms, developed a sitcom pilot for Sony TV, and has been a writer on ABC's Men in Trees. Michael has also written humor essays on dating for msn.com. He is currently a writer on the CW Network's Life Unexpected.



Maggie Malone is Director of Creative Development at Disney Animation Studios, where she has worked on such films as The Princess and the Frog, Bolt, and the Tinker Bell films. As a Director of Development at Universal, Maggie worked on The Tale of Despereaux and Seabiscuit. She is a graduate of Yale and is currently pursuing an MFA at UCLA's school of Theater, Film, and Television.