SFPA’S 2017 Grand Master Candidates

Voting continues as Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) members decide who will be honored as Grand Master this year. Four candidates are under consideration,

  • Ruth Berman is a long-time (since at least 1983) and award-winning member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She is a writer of short science fiction and speculative poetry. In 2003 for “Potherb Gardening” and in 2016 for “Time Travel Vocabulary Problems”, she won the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem. She was also the winner of the 2006 Dwarf Stars Award for her poem “Knowledge Of.” Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, New Worlds, Star Trek: The New Voyages, Shadows 2,Tales of the Unanticipated, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Ruth Berman has also been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. She was one of the founding members of The Rivendell Group in 1973. She was also a founding member of Minn-Stf, the local Minnesota Science Fiction Society, and has been extensively involved with helping the Minnesota speculative literary scene become what it is today. A selection of Ruth’s poems.
  • Terry A. Garey is a longstanding member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, providing poetry workshops singularly and with her performance group, the Lady Poetesses From Hell. She is a writer and editor. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies going back to at least 1978. She won the Rhysling Award in 1997 for “Spotting UFOs While Canning Tomatoes” and in 2013 for “The Cat Star.” She has edited poetry for Tales of the Unanticipated and speculative poetry anthologies including Time Gum, 1988, ed. Terry A. Garey and Eleanor Arnason, and Time Frames, 1991. Her non-fiction book, The Joy of Home Winemaking, has little to do with poetry, but is fun and instructive if you want to make wine. She lives with a librarian, two cats and many books in Minneapolis. A selection of Terry’s poems.
  • David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s poems have populated many magazines over two or more decades. He won the Rhysling Long Poem award with Kendall Evans in 2006 for “The Tin Men.” He was a nominee for the 2014 Elgin Award for Luminosity, and his The Edible Zoo placed 2nd and 3rd in 2013 and 2012 respectively. His dedicated work has helped keep the SFPA alive for years, serving first as Star*Line editor and then as President, plus maintaining Dreams & Nightmares, a quality magazine (the longest running print SFP magazine) that publishes spec poetry from one and all—without prejudice, encouraging new artists as well, for prozine pay out of his own pocket—and a poetry blog. He was a featured poet guest at ICFA, 2013. He serves as Chair and editor of the 2017 Rhysling Award and Rhysling Anthology.
  • Ann K. Schwader is an extraordinarily accomplished member of the SFPA. Her fiction and verse have been published in such magazines as Spectral Realms, Weirdbook, The Lovecraft EZine, Fungi, Weird Fiction Review, Dark Wisdom, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Dreams & Nightmares, Mythic Delirium, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Tales of the Unanticipated, The Weird Fiction Review, Star*Line, and Space & Time. Her mainstream haiku have recently appeared in countless specialized journals. Her most recent collection of weird verse, Dark Energies, was published by P’rea Press in August 2015 and a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. An omnibus collection, Twisted In Dream (Hippocampus Press, 2011); Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2010), a collection of dark science fiction poems was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for that year; her SF / Lovecraftian sonnet sequence, In the Yaddith Time (Mythos Books, 2007), preceded. She has won the Rhysling Award on two occasions: 2016 Long Form (tie) “Keziah” and 2010 Short Form “To Theia”. Her poetry has been nominated for and garnered 2nd or 3rd in the Rhysling Award at least 3 other times. Her collection Dark Energies received 3rd place in the 2016 Elgin Award.

[Thanks to F.J. Bergmann for assisting with the story.] 

3 thoughts on “SFPA’S 2017 Grand Master Candidates

  1. All excellent choices, all should eventually be Grand Masters. But I’d pick either Berman or Schwader this time. I prefer their poetry.

    Garey’s work as an editor is good. Time Frames is particularly good. Kopaska-Merkel’s Dreams & Nightmares is a great magazine. If it’s based on all of their contributions, one of them probably wins. But I prefer to focus on the poetry.

  2. @Robert Reynolds: I’m not sure if I’ve read anything by Schwader, but I’ve been an admirer of Berman’s work for a long time.

  3. @PhilRM: Schwader is great and well worth seeking out. She’s not hard to find. I’m pretty sure some of her collections are still available.

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