Welcome to the 15th installment of the 2017 Rhysling Poets’ Showcase. We are down to the last 36 poets (of 120) to introduce you to!
Today, I’m very pleased to bring you closer to six more fine poets whose Rhysling-nominated poems you can read in this year’s Rhysling Anthology. If you are a member of the SFPA, you will receive a print copy of that anthology. It’ll be coming along soon – we’re sure of it!
If you aren’t a member, you may purchase a PDF or order the print anthology here). As noted before, we will link to the nominated poems here when possible. (Some poems first appeared only in print but we are working on that).
And now, without further ado please meet:
- Goss, Theodora • “Rose Child” • Uncanny 13
- Gotera, Vince • “Elegy for Iain Banks” • Star*Line 39.3
- Gotera, Vince • “Space Opera” • Altered Reality Magazine 1
- Graham, Neile • “Feles Alieni Vere Sunt” • Devilfish Review 17
- O’Brien, Brandon • “god-date” • Uncanny 9
- Odasso, A. J. • “Nothing Goes Away” • The New England Review of Books
- Odasso, A. J. • “Sargasso Sea” • Remixt Magazine 1:1
- Odasso, A. J. • “Widening Gyre” • Not A Drop anthology (Beautiful Dragons Press) (not online)
- Opperman, K.A. • “Invocation of Diana” • Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer
- Opperman, K.A. • “Werewolf ” • Spectral Realms 4
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include 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; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into nine languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her prose-poem “Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks” (2003) won the Rhysling Award and her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. Follow her on Twitter: @theodoragoss
Vince Gotera writes poems and stories. Also the occasional creative nonfiction. And he edited the North American Review, the longest-lived literary magazine in the US. Starting in August he will take over as editor of Star*Line the SFPA’s official journal. He is a Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where he teaches creative writing and literature.
His books include the poetry collections Fighting Kite, Ghost Wars, and Dragonfly,as well as the critical study Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans. A new book of poems is forthcoming: Pacific Crossing.
He plays bass guitar and lead guitar; He also loves to bang on the drums! His favorite color is blue, in all its dynamic shades and flavors: cobalt, electric, royal, robin’s-egg, navy, cerulean, teal, indigo, sky as you can discover at his blog http://vincegotera.blogspot.de
Niele Graham is a poet and scholar. She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and currently lives in Seattle in the United States.
Graham serves as the program administrator for both the Ph.D. in the Built Environment and the interdiscipliinary certificates in Urban Design and Historic Preservation in the College of Built Environments (formerly the College of Architecture and Urban Planning) at the University of Washington. She also administers the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Follow her on Twitter: Neile_says
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, poet, performer, facilitator, and blogger from Trinidad in the Caribbean, with work in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales From The Caribbean. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published or upcoming in Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also a performer and facilitator with the.art.is Performing Arts Company, and the poetry editor of FIYAH Magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @therisingtithes
A. J. Odasso A.J.’s poetry has appeared in a number of strange and wonderful publications, including Sybil’s Garage, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, Cabinet des Fées, Midnight Echo, Not One of Us, Dreams & Nightmares, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Farrago’s Wainscot, Through the Gate, Liminality, inkscrawl, Battersea Review, and SWAMP Writing (just to name a few). Her début collection, Lost Books (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2010), was nominated for the 2010 London New Poetry Award and for the 2011 Forward Prize, and was also a finalist for the 2011 People’s Book Prize. Her second collection with Flipped Eye, The Dishonesty of Dreams, was released in 2014. She holds degrees from Wellesley College (B.A. in English), University of York (M.A. in Medieval Studies), and Boston University (M.F.A. in Creative Writing). You can find her at ajodasso.livejournal.com, as well as on Twitter.
K. A. Opperman is a 29 year old poet of horror and fantasy from Southern California. His most prominent influences include Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, David Park Barnitz, and Ernest Dowson. He has been published in a number of contemporary Weird magazines, such as The Weird Fiction Review, Spectral Realms, Weirdbook, Gothic Blue Book, The Audient Void, Ravenwood Quarterly, and others. His book length collection, The Crimson Tome, came out in 2015 from Hippocampus Press. In addition to being a member of the SFPA, he is an Active member of the HWA.
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