Coming Wednesday December21 with poet laureate, Christina M. Rau
Christina M. Rau is the author of the 2021 poetry collection What We Do To Make Us Whole, the Elgin Award-winning sci-fi fem poetry collection, Liberating The Astronauts (Aqueduct Press), and WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press) and For The Girls, I (dancing girl press). She’s served as Poet In Residence for Oceanside Library NY, was named Long Island Poet of the Year by Walt Whitman Birthplace, and is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Creative Works and a New York State DEC arts grant through Huntington Arts Council. She also serves as Editor-in-chief for the international literary journal The Nassau Review at Nassau Community College, where she teaches writing. http://www.christinamrau.com
This series is hosted by Akua Lezli Hope, who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, and peace. She wrote her first speculative poems in the sixth grade and has been in print every year, since 1974 with over 400 poems published.
Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (ArtFarm Press, 1995; Writer’s Digest book award winner); Them Gone (The Word Works, 2018); Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (ArtFarm Press, 2021 Elgin Award winner); and Stratospherics (a micro-chapbook of scifaiku available from the Quarantine Public Library). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, an SFPA award, and multiple Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations. She has won Rattle’s Poets Respond twice and she created Speculative Sundays, an online poetry reading series that presented 21 speculative poets in reading and conversation, 2020-2021. She is the editor of the record-breaking sea-themed issue of Eye To The Telescope #42, and of the historic first-of-its-kind anthology, NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, from Sundress Publications (2021).
Akua Lezli Hope won the 2022 Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council of the Arts for her project on Afrofuturistic Pastoral Speculative Poetry of which this series is a part. This project is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
SPECPO 
Thanks but….This is for next year!
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