Welcome to the fourth installment of our showcase of poets who have been nominated for this year’s (2017) Rhysling Award. 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…).
So, here, meet the next six poets from the 2017 Rhysling Anthology:
- Holly Lyn Walrath • “For Lonnie” • Liminality 9 • &• “Revolution (1764-1783)” • Abyss & Apex 58
- Jon Wesick • “Richard Feynman’s Commute” • The Were-Traveler, December 21
- Karen J. Weyant • “To the Girl Who Ran Through Crop Circles” • Strange Horizons 15 August
- Edith Hope Bishop • “When the Gunman Comes” • Mythic Delirium 2.3
- Jenny Blackford • “Houses of the Living, Houses of the Dead” • Ipswich Poetry Feast International Poetry Competition, Highly Commended
- Adam Bolivar • “The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner” • Spectral Realms 5
Holly Walrath is an author and freelance editor. She attended the University of Texas at Austin for her B.A. in English and the University of Denver for her Master’s in Creative Writing. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Liminality, Abyss & Apex, and The Fem, among others. She is a contract editor with Writership, a podcast and editing services company based in Austin, Texas. She also volunteers with Writespace, a nonprofit literary center in Houston, Texas, where she edited two anthologies and helped co-found Writefest literary festival. Holly currently resides in Seabrook, Texas. Find her online @hollylynwalrath or hlwalrath.com
Jon Wesick hosts Southern California’s best ice cream parlor poetry reading and 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. http://jonwesick.com
Karen J Weyant‘s work can be seen in 5AM, the Barn Owl Review, Caesura, Cave Wall, Cold Mountain Review, Conte,Copper Nickel and River Styx. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag’s 2011 Chapbook Contest). In 2007, she was awarded a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She now lives and writes in rural Pennsylvania, but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, NY. www.karenjweyant.com
Edith Hope Bishop is a novelist, volunteer, and mother in Seattle, Washington. She grew up in South Florida, studied English at Harvard, got her masters in Philosophy and Education at Columbia, and taught for several years in a Title I high school in Seattle. She is an active member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA) and SCBWI. She was a finalist in the PNWA Literary Contest in 2013 and volunteers for Sirens Conference (a conference on women in fantasy literature). She can be found online at ehbishop.com and is most at home near, on, or in any body of salt water.
Jenny Blackford won the medal in Classics at the University of Newcastle, branching to a career in computer networking in Melbourne. These days she is back in Newcastle and writing full time. Her short stories are published widely by Random House, Cosmos Magazine and in anthologies such as HarperCollins Dreaming Again. An historical novel The Priestess and the Slave (Hadley Rille Books) appeared in 2009. Her poems are in Westerly, The Pedestal Magazine, Midnight Echo, Star*Line, Eternal Haunted Summer, Dreams and Nightmares, Strange Horizons, Quadrant and Dolly. http://www.jennyblackford.com/
Adam Bolivar was born and bred in Boston, Massachusetts. A playwright and marionettist for the Scratch Brothers’ Prestodigital Phantasmagoria in Boston and Berkeley, Adam continued his involvement with puppetry by penning plays for the CastIron Carousel and the Drake Family Marionette Company in Portland, Oregon, where he currently resides with his beloved wife and son. His weird fiction and poetry have appeared on the pages of Black Wings of Cthulhu, Spectral Realms, the Lovecraft eZine, and in anthologies published by Chaosium and Eraserhead Press. His first book, The Fall of the House of Drake, was published by Dunhams Manor Press in 2015. His second book, The Lay of Old Hex, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press. http://adambolivar.com/
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