Welcome back to the 2017 Rhysling Poets' Showcase! This week we get to meet seven poets, some relative newcomers, and some established voices in the field of speculative poetry. Some have been nominated for the Rhysling before; for others, this is their first nomination. Their poetry can be found in full in the Anthology (which if you are a member, you will receive, and if you are not, you may purchase a PDF or pre-order the print anthology now). As noted before, we will link to the nominated poems here where possible (some poems appear only in print but we are working on getting around that…).

• Borski, Robert. “The Starlet Who Married A Monster,” Lupine Lunes, Popcorn Press, 2016. (Not available online.)
• Boston, Bruce and Manzetti, Alessandro.  “The Great Unknown,” Illumen, Spring 2016.
• Boston, Bruce and Manzetti, Alessandro. “Legend of the Albino Pythons and the Bloody Child,” Polu Texni April 18, 2016.
• Bovenmyer, Karen. “The Blind Elephants of Io,” Shortest Day, Longest Night, Arachne Press, 2016. (Full text and performance video.)
• Vlek, Aaron. “When Coyote Called Down the Stars,” The Were-Traveler, December 21, 2016.
• Wack, Margaret. “Classification of Folktales,”  Strange Horizons 2016 Fund Drive Bonus.
• Walker, T. D. “Portrait of the Captain with Small Waiting Objects,” Recompose 2: Ritualistic Pompadour, September 2016.

Robert Borski's poetry has appeared in Asimov's, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, and Dreams & Nightmares. BLOOD WALLAH, a collection of his better poems, remains available from Dark Regions Press. A self-described late-blooming child prodigy, he continues to live in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, near a bridge with trolls.     Bruce Boston is the author of more than fifty books and chapbooks, including the dystopian sf novel The Guardener’s Tale and the psychedelic bildungsroman Stained Glass Rain. His writing has appeared in hundreds of publications and received the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov’s Readers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Rhysling and Grandmaster Awards of the SFPA. For more information, please see www.bruceboston.com. Alessandro Manzetti is the author of more than twenty books, among his English works: the collections The Garden of Delight, The Massacre of the Mermaids, The Monster, the Bad and the Ugly, and the poetry collections Eden Underground, Sacrificial Nights (cowritten with Bruce Boston), and Venus Intervention. (with Corrine de Winter) His writing has appeared in dozen of publications in Italian and English, and received the Bram Stoker Award. For more information, please see www.battiago.com. Karen Bovenmyer earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and serves as the Nonfiction Assistant Editor of Escape Artists’ Mothership Zeta Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her short stories and poems appear in more than 40 publications (Karen's publications are listed on her LinkedIn page). Her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, an LGBT romantic adventure in 1820s Caribbean, is now available from Dreamspinner Press. For more information, please see karenbovenmyer.com. Aaron Vlek is a storyteller whose work focuses primarily on the trickster as bringer of delight and proponent of disquieting humors. Many of her short stories delve into the goings on of the jinn, and of a universal imagining of the Native American character, Coyote. Some works are historical in setting while others hail from the contemporary and urban landscape. She indulges from time to time in the reimagining of classic themes of Lovecraftian horror and the occult. Aaron is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where she spent most of her time writing. For more information, please see aaronvlek.wordpress.com. Margaret Wack is a writer, poet, and classicist whose work has been published in Strange Horizons, Liminality, Twisted Moon, and others. Her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling Award. She has a BA in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Poetry from Smith College, and is pursuing an MA in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College. She enjoys dead languages and bad weather.  For more information, please see margaretwack.com. T. D. Walker’s science fiction poems and stories have appeared in The Future Fire, Web Conjunctions, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Recompose, Abyss & Apex, Kaleidotrope, The Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere.After completing graduate work in English Literature, Walker began her career as a software developer. Walker writes about science fiction, feminism, and freethought at her blog, Freethinking Ahead.  She has given talks and written articles about literature and freethought for local and national secular humanist organizations. For more information, please see www.tdwalker.net.