Anthology Information
Editor and Rhysling Chair: David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Book Design: F.J. Bergmann
Cover Image: Liu Junwei, aka Shark (Shayudan 鲨鱼丹), sharksden.deviantart.com
Publisher: Science Fiction Poetry Association
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All Award Winners
Short Poem Category
First Place: “George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” • Marge Simon • Silver Blade 32
Second Place: “Build a Rocketship Contest: Alternative Class A Instructions and Suggestions”
• Wendy Rathbone • Asimov’s SF January
Third Place (tie): “Godzilla vs. King Kong” • James S. Dorr • Dreams and Nightmares 103
Third Place (tie): “Richard Feynman’s Commute” • Jon Wesick • The Were-Traveler Dec. 21
Third Place (tie): “The Box of Dust and Monsters” • Beth Cato • Devilfish Review 17
Long Poem Category
First Place: “Rose Child” Theodora Goss • Uncanny 13
Second Place: “The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner” •
Adam Bolivar • Spectral Realms 5
Third Place: “Not Like This” • Mary Soon Lee • Apex Magazine Aug. 4
Chair and Winner Biographies
Marge Simon’s works appear in publications such as DailySF Magazine, Pedestal, Dreams & Nightmares. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, “Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side,” and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She won the Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, 2010, and the SFPA’s Dwarf Stars Award, 2012. In addition to her poetry, she has published two prose collections: Christina's World (Sam’s Dot Publications, 2008) and Like Birds in the Rain (Sam’s Dot, 2007). She has won three Bram Stoker Awards® for Superior Work in Poetry. Her poems appear in Qualia Nous (Written Backwards), The Dark Phantastique (Jasunni Productions) and more poems appear in Chiral Mad (Written Backwards) anthology and the HWA/Simon & Schuster Y/A collection, 2015, and fiction upcoming in Chiral Mad 4 and The Beauty of Death: Death by Water. margesimon.com
Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions(2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014); and debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her work has been translated into eleven languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at TheodoraGoss.com.
Adam Bolivar specializes in writing metered and rhymed ballads, a traditional poetic form that taps into haunted undercurrents of folklore to produce spectral effects seldom found in other forms of writing. He is also a marionettist, and performs original plays written in ballad form. Bolivar's poetry has appeared on the pages of such publications as Spectral Realms and Black Wings of Cthulhu VI. His collection of weird balladry and Jack tales, The Lay of Old Hex, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press in 2018. http://adambolivar.com
Indiana short fiction writer and poet James Dorr’s THE TEARS OF ISIS was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award® nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Other books include STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE, DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET, and his all-poetry VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE). Also just out in June 2017 from Elder Signs Press is a novel-in-stories, TOMBS: A CHRONICLE OF LATTER-DAY TIMES OF EARTH. An Active Member of HWA and SFWA as well as the SFPA and with more than 500 individual appearances from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine to Yellow Bat Review, Dorr invites readers to visit his blog at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels and a short story collection
Nebula-nominated Beth Cato is the author of the Clockwork Dagger duology and the new Blood of Earth Trilogy from Harper Voyager. Her newest novel is Call of Fire. She’s a Hanford, California, native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cat. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato
Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. She has had over three hundred poems published, in places ranging from American Scholar, to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Not Like This” is part of The Sign of the Dragon, her epic fantasy told in poems. The first part of King Xau’s story, Crowned: The Sign of the Dragon, Book 1, won the 2016 Elgin Award. A dozen poems from the epic may be read at thesignofthedragon.com
All Nominated Poems
110 members voted on 99 short poems and 55 long poems from 80 publications.
Short Poems
- “3D printer” • Francis Wesley Alexander • Scifaikuest November
- “Absentation” • Lesley Wheeler • Thrush Poetry Journal, November
- “Adolescence” • Ken Poyner • Star*Line 39.4
- “After” • Herb Kauderer • Asimov's SF November/December
- “Always the Black and White Keys” • Corrine De Winter • Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase Vol. III, ed. David E. Cowen
- “Antagonist” • F.J. Bergmann • Spectral Realms 5
- “appendage sale” • Susan Burch • Star*Line 39.2
- “The Architect of Bonfires” • Tonya Liburd • Space & Time 127
- “The Ash Manifesto” • Rose Lemberg • Strange Horizons 10 October
- “At the Robot National Convention” • Alan Ira Gordon • Star*Line 39.3
- “The Bird Prince” • John W. Sexton • Faerie Magazine Summer
- “The birds forget to sing” • Carl Mayfield • Abbey 147
- “Black Bull of Norroway” • Jane Yolen • Goblin Fruit Winter
- “Bones Knock in the House” • Mary McMyne • Rose Red Review 18
- “Bottle Cast Upon A Dry Sea” • G.O. Clark • Asimov’s Science Fiction February
- “The Box of Dust and Monsters” • Beth Cato • Devilfish Review 17
- “A Bug in the System” • Anton Cancre • Quick Shivers about Bugs (Cosmonomic Multimedia)
- “Build a Rocketship Contest: Alternative Class A Instructions and Suggestions” • Wendy Rathbone • Asimov's SF January
- “Christmas on Mars” • Carolyn M. Hinderliter • Scifaikuest Vol. XIII, No. 4
- “Classification of Folktales” • Margaret Wack • Strange Horizons
- “The Dark between the Stars” • G.O. Clark • Star*Line 39.4
- “Death Rides USAir At Night” • Jane Yolen • Parody 5:1
- “Descent of the Composer” • Airea D. Matthews • Poem-a-Day October 24, Academy of American Poets
- “The Doppelgänger and the Ghost” • Lev Mirov • Eye to the Telescope 22
- “Dorothy Delivered” • Kathleen A. Lawrence • Altered Reality Magazine 1
- “Exotic Heads Trimmed Neatly” • John Reinhart • Eye to the Telescope 21
- “Falling (A Part)” • Alexandra Erin • medium.com June 8
- “The Fantasy of Hans Christian Andersen” • KH van Berkum • Strange Horizons February 8
- “Feles Alieni Vere Sunt” • Neile Graham • Devilfish Review 17
- “*For Quick Sale*” • Greer Woodward • Lupine Lunes, ed. Lester Smith (Popcorn Press)
- “Foreign Policy” • David Barber • Star*Line 39.3
- “The Frog” • K. Cassandra O’Malley • The Well of Changes (Bag Person Press) [reprint permission unavailable]
- “George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” • Marge Simon • Silver Blade 32
- “The Genius” • Sara Backer • Mithila Review 3
- “The Giantess’s Dream” • Ada Hoffman • Twisted Moon 1
- “Glastonbury, 1994” • P.S. Cottier • Project 365 + 1 June 29
- “Godzilla vs. King Kong” • James S. Dorr • Dreams and Nightmares 103
- “History Teacher” • Gary Every • Star*Line 39.4
- “How far does night have to fall?” • F.J. Bergmann • The Future Fire 38
- “I Left My Heart in San Francisco. I Left Yours Somewhere in Colorado …” • Matt Betts • Underwater Fistfight (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
- “Ink” • Akua Lezli Hope • Yellow Chair Review, Horror Issue, October
- “Invocation of Diana” • K.A. Opperman • Eternal Haunted Summer Summer
- “The Last Woman on Earth” • Mary Stone • Amethyst Arsenic 6:1
- “Learning the History of War” J.J. Steinfeld • Star*Line 39.3
- “Less than Human” • Marge Simon • You, Human (Dark Regions Press)
- “The Long Run” • Neil Gaiman • Uncanny November/December
- “Loose String” E. Kristin Anderson • Coe Review 47.1
- “Love in the Time of Apocalypse” • Ann Thornfield-Long • Silver Blade 31
- “Machine Testimonial 2” • Margaret Rhee • Mission at Tenth
- “Marginalia on Eiruvin 45b” • Bogi Takács • Bracken Magazine 2
- “Martian Garden” • John Philip Johnson • The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July/August 2016
- “Memorial” • Tim Jones • New Sea Land (Makaro Press)
- “The Memory Machines” • Jane Williams • The Pedestal Magazine 79
- “My Corpse, My Groom” • Ashley Dioses • The Audient Void: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy 1
- “My Pet Alien” • Dennis Caswell• Rattle Fall
- “A Natural History of Snow” • David Clink • The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Kelp Queen Press, CZP)
- “Nothing Goes Away” • A.J. Odasso • The New England Review of Books
- “Of My Wounds, There Are Many” • Stephanie M. Wytovich • Sanitarium Magazine 48
- “The Old Ones Gather” • Terrie Leigh Relf • Scifaikuest May
- “One Canoe” • Shari Caplan • Nonbinary Review 11: Anne of Green Gables
- “Orpheus” • Ace G. Pilkington • The Horror Zine June
- “Past Imperfect” • Deborah L. Davitt • Poetry Quarterly Summer
- “The Persecution of Witches” • Ali Trotta • Uncanny 11
- “The Phosphorescent Fungi” • D. L. Myers • Spectral Realms 4
- “Portrait of the Captain with Small Waiting Objects” • T.D. Walker • Recompose 2
- “Propagation” • Layla Al-Bedawi • Strange Horizons 18 April
- “Quack” • Neal Wilgus • Dreams and Nightmares 104
- “Quasar” • Triin Paja • Cleaver 14
- “Returning” • Mary Soon Lee • The Open Mouse May 6
- “Richard Feynman’s Commute” • Jon Wesick • The Were-Traveler December 21
- “Riding the Dark” B.J. Lee • Frostfire Worlds February
- “Rusalka” • Jane Yolen • Mythic Delirium 3.1
- “Salome’s New King” • Terry Miller • Devolution Z: The Horror Magazine 10
- “Sappho and the Woman of Starlight” • John W. Sexton • Eternal Haunted Summer Winter
- “Selkie” • E. Kristin Anderson • Faerie Magazine Summer
- “Skin” • Alice Fanchiang • Liminality 10
- “Song of the Encantado” • Jeremy Paden • Apex Magazine 83
- “Space Opera” • Vince Gotera • Altered Reality Magazine 1
- “The Sparrows in Her Hair” • Hester J. Rook • Strange Horizons 18 July
- “Spoiler Alert” • Matt Betts • Underwater Fistfight (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
- “The Spook Tree” • Cindy O’Quinn • Blood Moon Rising Magazine 66
- “Star Dust” • Josh Brown • Illumen 25
- “Stellar Quake” • John C. Mannone • The New England Journal of Medicine 375:1305
- “Supercomputer Spends the Night” • Danielle Zaccagnino • Weirderary 4
- “Sutekh From The Throne” • Denise Dumars • Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase Vol. III, ed. David E. Cowen
- “Terran Mythology” Shannon Connor Winward • Analog Science Fiction and Fact October
- “This Rat” • Anne Carly Abad • Chrome Baby 48
- “To Live In The Zombie Apocalypse” • Burlee Vang • Poem-A-Day December 20
- “To the Girl Who Ran Through Crop Circles” • Karen J. Weyant • Strange Horizons 18 August
- “Until Dawn” • Michael H. Hanson • Poetic Hustles 2 (Black Freighter Productions)
- “La Villa de Sirenia” • Jack Ralls • Star*Line 39.4
- “Well, Water, Stars” • Adele Gardner • Silver Blade 32
- “What Wants Us” • Karolina Fedyk • Star*Line 39.2
- “Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek” • Timons Esaias • Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek (Concrete Wolf)
- “Widening Gyre” • A.J. Odasso • Not A Drop anthology (Beautiful Dragons Press)
- “Witch Lord of the Hunt” • Ashley Dioses • Eternal Haunted Summer, Spring
- “The woman on the bus encounters time dilation” • Daniel R. Jones • Altered Reality Magazine
- “World's Tiniest Human” • Muriel Leung • The Adroit Journal 16
Long Poems
- “Adam’s Rendezvous with Dante” • John C. Mannone • Last Darn Rites Anthology (Whitesboro Writers, 2016)
- “Alice-Ecila” • Steph Post • Nonbinary Review 10: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
- “At Issue, the Miramo” • Ken Poyner • Dreams and Nightmares 103
- “Best of” • Sarah Ann Winn • Found Poetry Review: Bowietry
- “The Blind Elephants of Io” • Karen Bovenmyer • Shortest Day, Longest Night (Arachne Press)
- “The Butterflies of Traxl IV” • John Reinhart • The Pedestal Magazine 79
- “The Chinese Pirate Ching Shih Plays Go With a Hooded Opponent” • Kendall Evans • Abyss & Apex 59
- “Cobblestone Dragon” • Herb Kauderer • Polu Texni July 11
- “Dame Evergreen” • Rebecca Buchanan • Faerie Magazine Winter
- “The Dark Lord’s Diary” • Lee S. Hawke • Star*Line 39.1
- “Data Mine” • Alexandra Erin • medium.com October 24
- “The Death of the Horse” • Beth Cato • Remixt Magazine 1:8
- “Defender Prime” • A.C. Spahn • Outposts of Beyond July
- “Elegy for Iain Banks” • Vince Gotera • Star*Line 39.3
- “Exploratory Colony 454—15th May, 2052” • Lore Bernier • Eye to the Telescope 20
- “First Lesson” • Mary Soon Lee • Silver Blade 30
- “For Lonnie” • Holly Walrath • Liminality 9
- “Further” • F.J. Bergmann • Lovecraft eZine 38
- “Getting Winterized: A Guide To Rural Living” • Elizabeth R. McClellan • Angels of the Meanwhile April
- “god-date” • Brandon O'Brien • Uncanny 9
- “The Great Unknown” • Bruce Boston and Alessandro Manzetti • Illumen Spring
- “Houses of the Living, Houses of the Dead” • Jenny Blackford • Ipswich Poetry Feast International Poetry Competition, Highly Commended
- “I Will Be Your Grave” • Tlotlo Tsamaase • Strange Horizons 7 November
- “Im Wald” • Sandi Leibowitz • Mythic Delirium 3.2
- “In Defence of Science” • David Clink • The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Kelp Queen Press, CZP)
- “The Inconceivable Shape” • Simon Smith • Chrome Baby 45
- “Interview with a 22nd-Century Sex Worker” • Darren Lipman • Strange Horizons 4 July
- “The Journeymaker to Keddar (II)” • Rose Lemberg • Marginalia to Stone Bird (Aqueduct Press)
- “Legend of the Albino Pythons and the Bloody Child” • Bruce Boston & Alessandro Manzetti • Polu Texni 18 April
- “The Leviathans of Europa” • Christina Sng • Polu Texni 10 October
- “The Lies You Learned” • S. Qiouyi Lu • Liminality 7
- “little stomach” • Charlotte Geater • Strange Horizons 26 September
- “Luminous Decay” • Robert Frazier • Dreams and Nightmares 103
- “Morning During Migration Season” • Beth Cato • Star*Line 39.4
- “Not Like This” • Mary Soon Lee • Apex Magazine August 4
- “Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas Lost at Sea, 1527” • Lisa M. Bradley • Strange Horizons 3 October [reprint permission declined]
- “Phoenix Fire, Tabula Rasa” • Kim Eun-byeol • Stone Telling 13
- “The Poem Gardens of the Ascari” • Rohinton Daruwala • Strange Horizons 13 June
- “Revolution (1764–1783)” • Holly Lyn Walrath • Abyss & Apex 58
- “The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner” • Adam Bolivar • Spectral Realms 5
- “The Robot by the Fireplace” • Ken Poyner • Eye to the Telescope 20
- “Rose Child” • Theodora Goss • Uncanny 13
- “Sargasso Sea” • A.J. Odasso • Remixt Magazine 1:1
- “The Starlet Who Married A Monster” • Robert Borski • Lupine Lunes, ed. Lester Smith (Popcorn Press)
- “Storm Miners” • Deborah L. Davitt • Blue Monday Review August
- “Surviving a Canadian Poem” • David Clink • The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Kelp Queen Press, CZP)
- “Talk to the Machines” • Johan Jönsson • Dreams and Nightmares 104
- “Thirteen Ways to See a Ghost” • Shannon Connor Winward • 2016 SFPA Poetry Contest
- “To the weaver, from the woman who slew Bakunawa” • M. Sereno • Stone Telling 13
- “Väinämöinen Sings” • Jennifer Lawrence • Eternal Haunted Summer Winter
- “We Shall Meet in the Star-Spackled Ruins” • Wendy Rathbone • 2016 SFPA Poetry Contest
- “Were-” • Naru Dames Sundar • Liminality Summer
- “Werewolf” • K.A. Opperman • Spectral Realms 4
- “When Coyote Called Down the Stars” • Aaron Vlek • The Were-Traveler December 21
- “When the Gunman Comes” • Edith Hope Bishop • Mythic Delirium 2.3
Nominations per Publication
| Number of Nominations | Publication Name |
|---|---|
| 1 | Abbey |
| 2 | Abyss & Apex |
| 1 | The Adroit Journal |
| 3 | Altered Reality Magazine |
| 1 | Amethyst Arsenic |
| 1 | Analog |
| 1 | Angels of the Meanwhile |
| 2 | Apex Magazine |
| 3 | Asimov’s Science Fiction |
| 1 | The Audient Void |
| 1 | Blood Moon Rising Magazine |
| 1 | Blue Monday Review |
| 1 | Bracken Magazine |
| 2 | Chrome Baby |
| 1 | Cleaver |
| 1 | Coe Review |
| 2 | Devilfish Review |
| 1 | Devolution Z: The Horror Magazine |
| 5 | Dreams and Nightmares |
| 4 | Eternal Haunted Summer |
| 4 | Eye to the Telescope |
| 3 | Faerie Magazine |
| 1 | Found Poetry Review |
| 1 | Frostfire Worlds |
| 1 | The Future Fire |
| 1 | Goblin Fruit |
| 2 | Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase Vol. III |
| 1 | The Horror Zine |
| 2 | Illumen |
| 1 | Ipswich Poetry Feast International Poetry Competition |
| 1 | Last Darn Rites Anthology (Whitesboro Writers) |
| 4 | Liminality |
| 1 | Lovecraft eZine |
| 2 | Lupine Lunes (Popcorn Press) |
| 1 | The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction |
| 1 | Marginalia to Stone Bird (Aqueduct Press) |
| 2 | medium.com |
| 1 | Mission at Tenth |
| 1 | The Mithila Review |
| 3 | Mythic Delirium |
| 1 | The New England Journal of Medicine |
| 1 | The New England Review of Books |
| 1 | New Sea Land (Makaro Press) |
| 2 | Nonbinary Review |
| 1 | Parody |
| 2 | The Pedestal Magazine |
| 1 | Project 365 + 1 |
| 1 | The Open Mouse |
| 1 | Outposts of Beyond |
| 1 | Parody |
| 2 | Poem-A-Day |
| 1 | Poetic Hustles |
| 1 | Poetry Quarterly |
| 3 | Polu Texni |
| 1 | Quick Shivers about Bugs (Cosmonomic Multimedia) |
| 1 | Rattle |
| 1 | Recompose |
| 2 | Remixt Magazine |
| 3 | The Role of Lightning in Evolution (CZP) |
| 1 | Rose Red Review |
| 1 | Sanitarium Magazine |
| 3 | Scifaikuest |
| 2 | SFPA Poetry Contest |
| 1 | Shortest Day, Longest Night (Arachne Press) |
| 4 | Silver Blade |
| 1 | Space & Time |
| 3 | Spectral Realms |
| 11 | Star*Line |
| 2 | Stone Telling |
| 11 | Strange Horizons |
| 1 | Thrush Poetry Journal |
| 1 | Twisted Moon |
| 4 | Uncanny |
| 2 | Underwater Fistfight (Raw Dog Screaming Press) |
| 1 | Weirderary |
| 1 | The Well of Changes (Bag Person Press) |
| 2 | The Were-Traveler |
| 1 | Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek (Concrete Wolf) |
| 1 | Yellow Chair Review |
| 1 | You, Human (Dark Regions Press) |