Since 2006, the SFPA has coordinated a series of virtual poetry readings with a Halloween theme by current SFPA members.
Curated by a volunteer editor during the month of October each year, recordings of accepted poems are then hosted on the SFPA website, along with art and poet biographies, if desired.
Curator
Miguel O. Mitchell, PhD (he/his/him) is a Black speculative poet, SFF author, visual artist, and retired chemistry professor. His poems have appeared in Amazing Stories, Dreams & Nightmares, Eye to the Telescope, FIYAH, Sauúti Terrors anthology, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, Scifaikuest, Space and Time, Star*Line, and the anthology Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2022). Two of his poems were nominated for the 2022 Rhysling Award in the Long Poem category. Dr. Mitchell has also published two poetry collections, Surrealia (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2024) and Periodic Table of Alien Species (Elements 1-86) (Barnes & Noble Press, 2021). He is the Editor of the 2025 Dwarf Stars anthology, was Co-editor (with David C. Kopaska-Merkel) of the 2023 Dwarf Stars anthology, and is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of SpecPoVerse: An International Journal of Speculative Poetry (https://specpoverse.org).
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Accepted Poems
"Shapeshifter's Respite" by Akua Lezli Hope
Akua Lezli Hope, a Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry (SFPA), has been in print since 1974. Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest book award winner), Them Gone & Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (Elgin Award winner). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include the NEA, two NYFA fellowships, SFPA award, Rhysling awards, IGNYTE & Critter awards; as well as multiple Best of the Net, Rhysling, Dwarf Star, & Pushcart Prize nominations. She won NYSCA grants to create Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry & to explore disability poetics. She created the ongoing Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading series, now in its 6th year. She edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first of its kind, and the largest Eye to the Telescope. Her speculative fiction is included in the ground-breaking anthology, Dark Matter, the celebrated Africa Risen anthology, & Afrofuturism Short Stories, among others. She creates sculpture and jewelry in several media and has published over 100 crochet designs. Her collection TELEPATH, will be published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing in April 2026.
"Derelict" by Jonathan Maberry
JONATHAN MABERRY is a NYTimes bestselling author, 5-time Bram Stoker Award-winner, 4-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, poet, and comic book writer. He writes in multiple genres including suspense, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and action. V-WARS (Netflix) was based on his books/comics; Alcon is developing his teen post-apocalyptic novels for film; and Chad Stahelski, director of JOHN WICK, is developing his bestselling Joe Ledger thrillers for TV. Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER was partly based on his work. He’s president of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, and the editor of Weird Tales Magazine. www.jonathanmaberry.com
"On October 31st" by LindaAnn LoSchiavo, with Linnaea Mallette's Fantasy Skull (art)
LindaAnn LoSchiavo, native New Yorker, a Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Best of the Net, and Dwarf Stars nominee, is a member of SFPA, The British Fantasy Society, and The Dramatists Guild. She's Poetry SuperHighway's Poet of the Week [Sept. 12-18, 2022]. Elgin Award winner A Route Obscure and Lonely, Concupiscent Consumption,Women Who Were Warned, and Messengers of the Macabre: Hallowe'en Poems (co-authored with David Davies) are her latest poetry titles. Forthcoming: Apprenticed to the Night, a poetry collection in hardcover from Beacon Books. linktr.ee/LindaAnn.LoSchiavo
"Fantasy Skull" is copyright Linnaea Mallette, used here by permission of the artist.
"In The Cursed Garden" by Sumiko Saulson
Sumiko Saulson is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® Finalist for Poetry for The Rat King (2022, Dooky Zines) and Melancholia (2024, Bludgeoned Girls Press). Elgin Award Nominee (2022). 2018 Afrosurrealist Writers Award, and 2021 Ladies of Horror Readers' Choice Award winner. Their novel Somnalia: The Metamorphoses of Flynn Keahi is available on Mocha Memoirs Press
"Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Most Delectable Carving" by Katherine Quevedo
Katherine Quevedo hails from Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. She is the author of the Elgin Award-winning chapbook The Inca Weaver’s Tales (Sword & Kettle Press) and the fantasy novella Thrice Petrified (Of Metal and Magic Publishing). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Rhysling Award and appears in Asimov’s, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, The Sprawl Mag, Old Moon Quarterly, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys watching movies, playing old-school video games, singing, belly dancing, and making spreadsheets. Find her at www.katherinequevedo.com.
"Werecorn" by H. Russell Smith (read by Fabra)
Dr. H. Russell Smith has no idea what he’s doing—at least when it comes to high voltage experiments. He is, though, exceptionally gifted in other harmless low-power supervillain hijinks. Rusty spends his time travels with his dog, Cupcake Nessie, who daily regrets her choice of companion. With a face for radio and a voice for silent movies, he has once again enlisted the unreproachable vocal talent of Fabra, NYC’s mysterious master of resurrected languages, to read this poem. Wait. Have you heard her somewhere before? Maybe on the air long, long ago...
"The Price" by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 & 25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA's Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is currently the poetry editor of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
"The Windows Breathe" by Mike Allen
Mike Allen is the editor of Mythic Delirium and a past president of SFPA. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award finalist, a two-time Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award. He's also the editor and publisher of Mythic Delirium Books. You can follow Mike’s exploits as a writer at descentintolight.com, as an editor at mythicdelirium.com, and all at once on Twitter at @mythicdelirium.
“The Windows Breathe” first appeared in Dreams & Nightmares 67, 2004.
"The Skeleton Company" by Ken Anderson
Island of Wak-Wak Press (Orebro, Sweden) recently released Ken Anderson’s The Ward at Twilight: Goth Poems, nominee for the 2025 Elgin Award. Red Ogre Review Books (L.A.) released his The Goose Liver Anthology (Mother Goose Meets Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology), also a nominee for the 2025 Elgin Award. His first poetry book was The Intense Lover. Coffin Bell Journal nominated his poem “Blood Quartet” for 2024 Best of the Net anthology. He was a Finalist in the 2021 Saints and Sinners poetry contest. His poetry manuscript A Sweet Oblivious Antidote was a Semifinalist for the 2024 Washington Prize.
The Skeleton Company” first appeared in The Ward at Twilight: Goth Poems (Nov. 14, 2024).
"Picnic under a Graveyard Sun" by Beatriz Fernandez
Beatriz F. Fernandez is the author of The Ocean Between Us (Backbone Press, 2017) and Shining from a Different Firmament (Finishing Line Press, 2015) which she presented at the Miami Book Fair International. She has read her poetry on WLRN, South Florida’s NPR station and is a former grand prize winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Falling Star Magazine (2014 Pushcart nom.), Strange Horizons, Thirty West Publishing House (2017 Pushcart nom.), Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry (2020 Pushcart nom.).
"The Halloween We All Abhorred" by Kate Boyes
Kate Boyes is a speculative nature writer whose work focuses on the near-future environments and alternate histories of Earth, Mars, and several choice exoplanets. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including those hosted on the SFPA website. Her 2024 debut speculative poetry collection—GRUB: The Misadventures of a Miscreant and His Associates on Alt-Earth—arrived just in time for the strangest U.S. election cycle ever. She lives on the coast of Oregon, where she studies the foraging habits of Cascadian trolls and werebears.
"The Demon" by Wortley Clutterbuck
Wortley Clutterbuck’s poetry has been featured in many literary journals over the last 300 years. A Collected Works is available from the anti-christ of retail audio at soundcloud.com/wortleyclutterbuck.
"Adult Female, Deceased" by David Kopaska-Merkel (read by Diane Severson)
David C. Kopaska-Merkel, a retired paleontologist, won the 2006 Rhysling Award for best long poem (collaboration with Kendall Evans), and edits Dreams and Nightmares magazine (since 1986). He has edited Star*Line, an issue of Eye to the Telescope, and several Rhysling anthologies, has served as SFPA president, and is an SFPA Grandmaster. His poems (more than 1200 of them) have been published in Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and more than 200 other venues. Some Disassembly Required, a collection of dark speculative poetry, won the 2023 Elgin award. His latest collection, Unwholesome Guests, was published in 2024 by Weird House. Blog: dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com;
"The Stray Thing" by Robert Frazier
Robert Frazier has seen his work in such publications as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Amazing, Weird Tales, Tales of the Unanticipated, Dreams & Nightmares, and The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. His work has also appeared in almost every significant anthology containing science fiction poetry. He received an Asimov’s Readers’ Poll Award in 1991. Frazier’s original collections include Peregrine (1978), Co-Orbital Moons (1988) and The Daily Chernobyl (2000, winner of the Anamnesis Press Poetry Chapbook Award). He collaborated with Bruce Boston on Chronicles of the Mutant Rainforest (1992). He was a longtime editor of Star*Line and was the editor of Speculative Poetry Review and of the seminal anthology Burning with a Vision. He was elected an SFPA Grand Master in 2005.
"A Parrot in My Fireplace" by Angela Acosta
Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her creative and academic work center on imagining possible worlds and preserving the cultural legacies of women writers. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Utopia Award nominee. Her Rhysling nominated poetry has appeared in Heartlines Spec, Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of the Elgin nominated poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023).
"Little Witchling" by Clarabelle Miray Fields
Clarabelle Miray Fields is a Rhysling-nominated, award-winning speculative writer from Boulder, Colorado, whose work has appeared in SpecPoVerse, Belladonna's Garden Lit, Morsus Vitae, Corvid Queen, Circe's Cauldron, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in classical languages (summa cum laude, 2018) and often writes at the intersections of ancient myth, feminism, scifi, and the spaces in-between. When she isn't writing, you can usually find her in nature, hot thermos of dark coffee in hand. Find out more at https://clarabellefields.com or @cfieldswriting on Instagram.
"Little Witchling" is forthcoming in Alien Buddha Press' Arcane Magick anthology (November 2025), and is posted here with permission of the publisher.
"Occam's Razor Shaves Society" by Rich Magahiz
Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He wrangles computers as a day job but imagines a time when life might center around other things. His work has appeared at Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Sein und Werden, Call Me [Brackets], Bewildering Stories, and Contemporary Haibun Review. His website is zeroatthebone.us.
"Occam's Razor Shaves Society" first appeared in Star*Line 47.2 (2024).
"Taxidermy" by M. Frost
The creative work (and sometimes nightmares) of M. Frost appears in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Orion’s Belt, and many others, with chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak, Fall 2025). Explore further at mfrostwords.com and follow @mfrostwords.bsky.social.
Taxidermy first appeared in Star*Line 29.6 (2006).
"Annointed" by Leslie Laurence
Leslie Laurence resides in a purple house in Northern California. A painter and digital artist, she is picking up the pen she set down twenty years ago.
"Did You Hear about the Neighbors?" by Seth Wade
Seth Wade is a philosopher in the ethics of technology pursuing his PhD at Florida State University. You can read his poetry and prose in publications like Strange Horizons, McSweeney's, Hunger Mountain Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Find more of his work or contact him at https://www.sethwade.info