Now introducing The Backdoor Judges! We are pleased to announce the judges who have generously offered their time to evaluate your entry. Below you can take a look at who will be assessing your work. The three judges you see below have been carefully hand picked to represent the industry and are most qualified to judge your work.
Julie Schwietert Collazo - Established writer and editor
Bilingual writer and editor interested in overlooked people and places, especially in Latin America. She has written about Chinese Cubans in Havana, Generation Y in Colombia, workers’ and indigenous movements in Mexico City, and environmental issues in Chile. She was one of only a handful of journalists to visit the Joint Detention Facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in 2008.
She has lived in Mexico City and San Juan, Puerto Rico, and currently lives in New York. She is the managing editor of Matador Network, the lead educator of Matador’s travel writing program, and contributing writer to Fodor’s Puerto Rico and Fodor’s Caribbean, as well as several print magazines.
Xavier Font – Director of Studies at the International Centre for Responsible Tourism
Director of Studies at the International Centre for Responsible Tourism at Leeds Metropolitan University where he supervises the postgraduate continuous professional development masters as well as the PhD programme, and consults with industry on responsible change. With a background in marketing, Xavier is interested in entrepreneurial ways to change business practice by providing market-led product development opportunities.
Ethan Gelber – Media and Communications Manager for WHL Group
Ethan Gelber has spent more than half his life on the road. Happily lost at large in a world that never gets any smaller, he has devoted most of this time to a baffling diversity of projects, most associated with writing/editing, cross-cultural communication and education, travel, bicycling and the arts. At present he manages media and communications for the WHL Group and edits the WHL Group blog.
