The Science Fiction Poetry Association is taking nominations from members for the Elgin Awards. Named for founder Suzette Haden Elgin, the awards are given for Chapbook and Book.
To be considered, chapbooks must contain 10-39 pages of poetry and books must contain 40 or more pages of poetry. The books must have been published in 2014 or 2015.
E-books are eligible, but self-published books are not. Single-author and collaborative books are eligible; anthologies are not. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. Books must be in English, but translations are eligible. In the case of translations that also contain the poems in the original language, those pages will not count toward the total page count.
Any works that have already won 1st-3rd place in the preceding year are ineligible.
A cumulative list of nominated books is posted on the SFPA website. The deadline to nominate is May 15.
This year’s chair is Josh Brown, who is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. A graduate of the University of Minnesota–Duluth with a degree in English Literature, he has spent the past fifteen years in the publishing industry working for and with award-winning publishers and best-selling authors.
An active member of SFPA, Josh Brown’s work can be found in numerous anthologies as well as in Star*Line, Scifaikuest, Mithila Review, Fantasy Scroll Magazine, and more. His essay, “Poems and Songs of The Hobbit” was recently featured in Critical Insights: The Hobbit (Salem Press, 2016). He served as editor for issue 20 of Eye to the Telescope, the official online journal of the SFPA. He currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two sons.
The award recognizes the best speculative poem of 1–10 lines published in the previous year, and is designed to honor excellent scifaiku, tanka, cinquains, and other types of short poems that tend to be overshadowed in SFPA’s Rhysling Award competition.
The poems in the 2016 Dwarf Stars anthology were selected by editors Jeannine Hall Gailey & Lesley Wheeler. SFPA members have until August 31 to vote their favorite short-short poem from the anthology and determine who will receive the Dwarf Stars Award.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Accident-Prone • Susan Rooke • inkscrawl 8
Alice was chasing white rabbits out of a black hole • John C. Mannone • Abbreviate Journal, July/August 2015
Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town • John Philip Johnson (Graphic Poetry, 2014)
Undoing Winter • Shannon Connor Winward (Finishing Line Press, 2014)
Full-length Books
The Acolyte • Nancy Hightower (Port Yonder Press, 2015)
Chemical Letters • Octavia Cade (Popcorn Press, 2015)
The Crimson Tome • K. A. Opperman (Hippocampus Press, 2015)
Crowned: The Sign Of The Dragon Book 1 • Mary Soon Lee (Dark Renaissance Books, 2015)
Dark Energies • Ann K. Schwader (P’rea Press, 2015)
Dawn of the Algorithm • Yann Rousselot (Inkshares, 2015)
The Dishonesty of Dreams • A.J. Odasso (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2014)
Dreams from a Black Nebula • Wade German (Hippocampus Press, 2014)
An Exorcism of Angels • Stephanie Wytovich (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2015)
Gravedigger’s Dance • G.O. Clark (Dark Renaissance Books, 2014)
Eden Underground • Alessandro Manzetti (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2015)
The Endless Machine • Max Ingram (Bone Forge Books, 2015)
If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? • Matthea Harvey (Graywolf Press, 2014)
An Inheritance of Stone • Leslie J. Anderson (Alliteration Ink, 2014)
Lilith’s Demons • Julie r. Enszer (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2015)
The Madness of Empty Spaces • David E. Cowen (Weasel Press, 2014)
The Manufacturer of Sorrow • Michelle Scalise (Eldritch Press, 2014)
Naughty Ladies • Marge Simon (Eldritch Press, 2015)
Resonance Dark and Light • Bruce Boston (Eldritch Press, 2015)
The Robot Scientist’s Daughter • Jeannine Hall Gailey (Mayapple Press, 2015)
Solar Maximum • Sueyeun Juliette Lee (Futurepoem Books, 2015)
Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience • Laura Madeline Wiseman (Lavender Ink, 2014)
Space Traveler • Benjamin S. Grossberg (University of Tampa Press, 2014)
To Love As Aswang • Barbara Jane Reyes (PAWA, 2015)
Turn Left at November: Poems • Wendy Rathbone (Eye Scry Publications, 2015)
Visitations into Sídhe and Tír na nÓg • Alex Ness (Uffda Press, 2015)
To be considered, chapbooks must contain 10-39 pages of poetry and books must contain 40 or more pages of poetry. The books must have been published in 2014 or 2015.
E-books are eligible, but self-published books are not. Single-author and collaborative books are eligible; anthologies are not. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. Books must be in English, but translations are eligible. In the case of translations that also contain the poems in the original language, those pages will not count toward the total page count.
Any works that have already won 1st-3rd place in the preceding year are ineligible.
With a jolt of popularity from its latest edition and a larger pop cultural footprint, Dungeons & Dragons might be making a significant comeback. (A handbook for the game topped Amazon’s best-sellers list for several days in 2014.) The largest group of players are millennials, and more of the new devotees are female than you might have thought, too. As a freelance cartoonist, journalist and a game-player in D.C., I wanted to explore why D&D isn’t just a throwback.
This report is in far greater depth – not only did they crawl the top 100 in subgenre, but print, audio, and also-boughts as well. It’s tracking over 1 million titles, to shine a light into the previously dark unknown of who and what isn’t on a bestseller list but is still selling, and how, and where. And the results – are impressive!
Our methodology employs a software spider that crawls across Amazon’s bestseller lists. The 200,000+ titles on those lists make up roughly 60% of Amazon’s daily sales. This leaves an appreciable number of titles and sales unaccounted for. There’s more elephant here to uncover! We’ve long heard this might be the case, as independent authors familiar with our data have claimed to be making a livable wage without a single one of their books appearing on any Amazon bestseller list. These are the truly invisible among the already difficult-to-discern. We wanted to see if they could be found.
So for this report, we went deeper. Instead of just looking at Amazon’s bestseller lists, we had our spider follow links to also-bought recommendations and also through each authors’ full catalog. This resulted in a million-title dataset, our most comprehensive and definitive look yet at author earnings. We were able to tally up precisely how many indie authors, Big Five authors, small/medium press authors, and Amazon-imprint authors are currently making enough from Amazon.com sales to land in a number of “tax brackets”.
The report has lots of graphs and interpretive text, and ends with this comment:
When we lowered the author earnings bar to $50,000 a year, we found 142 invisible authors that were earning that much or more on Amazon.com, without any of their titles appearing on any category best-seller lists. 105 of those 142 were self-published indies.
We live in exciting times. Today it’s possible to be a full-time professional author, quietly earning $50,000+ a year — even six figures a year — without ever sending a query letter to anyone. On Amazon alone, the data shows over a thousand indie authors earning a full-time living right now with their self-published titles.
Digital disruption has upended virtually every corner of publishing, but in the world of comic books, something curious is happening: Print sales are thriving alongside the rise of their digital counterparts.
Print comic book revenues have been on the rise in recent years, even as digital comics’ sales boom. Print receipts have held up at a time when publishers have introduced all-you-can-download subscriptions that offer thousands of comics for a flat monthly or annual fee.
In 2014, digital comics revenues excluding unlimited subscriptions reached $100 million, according to ICv2, an online trade magazine that tracks comic sales and other trends. That was up from just $1 million seven years ago, when ICv2 started collecting data.
(4) RHYSLING ANTHOLOGY. While members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association have already received a copy, the public can buy from Amazon the 2016 Rhysling Poetry Anthology with the works nominated for this year’s award.
The anthology allows the members to easily review and consider all nominated works without the necessity of obtaining the diverse number of publications in which the nominated works first appeared and serves as a showcase of the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry of 2015. The Rhysling Anthology is available to anyone with an interest in this unique compilation of verse from some of the finest poets in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry.
What is a write-a-thon, anyway? Think charity walk-a-thon. In a walk-a-thon, volunteers walk as far as they can in return for pledges from sponsors who make donations, usually based on the number of miles the volunteer walks. Our Write-a-Thon works like that too, but instead of walking, our volunteers write with a goal in mind. Their sponsors make donations to Clarion sometimes based on number of words written, sometimes based on other goals, or just to show support for the writer and Clarion.
And there are incentives.
As always, we have prizes for our top Write-a-Thon earners. In addition, this year we have surprises as well as prizes!
The top fundraiser will receive a commemorative 2016 Clarion Write-a-Thon trophy celebrating their success.
Our top five fundraisers will each receive a critique from a well-known Clarion instructor or alumnus. We’ve lined up Terry Bisson, David Anthony Durham, Kenneth Schneyer, Judith Tarr, and Mary Turzillo to have a look at your golden prose. A roll of the dice decides who is paired with whom. (The authors have three months to complete their critiques, and the short story or chapters submitted must be 7,500 words or less.)
Our top ten fundraisers will each receive a $25 gift certificate of their choice from a selection of bookstores and stationers.
A few small but special surprises will be distributed randomly among everyone who raises $50 or more. Lucky winners will be decided by Write-a-Thon minions drawing names from Clara the Write-a-Thon Cat’s hat. These are such a surprise that even we don’t know what they are yet. We do know that certain of our minions will be visiting places like Paris and Mongolia this summer. Anything at all might turn up in their luggage. In addition, who knows what mystery items unnamed Clarionites might donate to the loot!
For those who don’t know, the series was a top-rated syndicated children’s show during its original two-season run. Despite its initial success, previous attempts at bringing Voltron back haven’t worked out, and the show hasn’t returned to air in three decades. That’s all about to change now, thanks to Netflix. Here’s what we know about the company’s planned upcoming revival so far….
Here’s a trailer.
ROAR, created by the Voltron production team, is a special look inside Season 1 of the Netflix original series DreamWorks Voltron Legendary Defender, which reimagines one of the most popular fan-favorite shows of all time in an all-new comedic action-packed show from executive producer Joaquim Dos Santos (The Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender) and co-executive producer Lauren Montgomery (The Legend of Korra).
(7) BRADBURY. The New Yorker published Ray Bradbury’s reminiscence “Take Me Home” the day before he died in 2012.
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents’ boarding house, in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing Amazing Stories, with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. Soon after, the creative beast in me grew when Buck Rogers appeared, in 1928, and I think I went a trifle mad that autumn. It’s the only way to describe the intensity with which I devoured the stories. You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.
When I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.
(8) MORE BANG FOR THE BILLION. The news is filled with speculation about the Rogue One reshoots – which may involve literal shooting judging by the latest hire.
Veteran stunt coordinator and second unit director Simon Crane has been tapped to assist with the lengthy reshoots for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
Rogue One, being directed by Gareth Edwards, will undergo significant additional filming this summer, it was revealed earlier this week. Disney and Lucasfilm are hoping to accomplish several goals with the reshoots, including working on the tone of what has been described by sources as a “war movie.” The lightening of the feel of the film is meant to broaden its appeal.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, and Angel Johnston for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
The Science Fiction Poetry Association’s annual Poetry Contest is taking entries from members and nonmembers through August 31. Unpublished poems only.
Prizes will be awarded for the best poem in 3 categories:
Long (50 lines and more [prose 500 words and up]).
Line count does not include title or stanza breaks.
All sub-genres of speculative poetry allowed in any form. Entries will be blind-judged: author identification will be removed before poems are sent to contest judge Michael Kriesel (winner of North American Review’s 2015 Hearst Prize and President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.).
There’s a $2 entry fee per poem. See complete rules and specifications here.
Prizes will be awarded in each category (Dwarf, Short, Long): $100 First Prize, $50 Second Prize, $25 Third Prize. The first through third place poems also will be published on Poetry Planet (StarShipSofa.com) podcast magazine and on the SFPA website.
The Rhysling Award is given in two categories. “Best Long Poem” is for poems of 50+ lines, or for prose poems, of 500+ words. “Best Short Poem” is limited to poems of no more than 49 lines, or prose poems of no more than 499 words.
Bergmann says this is the highest number of nominated poems the award has ever had (71 short and 44 long), coming from the broadest list of publications as well, 59. Strange Horizons has the most nominees, 11.
Named for SFPA founder Suzette Haden Elgin, the awards are presented in two categories, Chapbook and Book. To be considered, chapbooks must contain 10-39 pages of poetry and books must contain 40 or more pages of poetry. The books must have been published in 2014 or 2015.
E-books are eligible, but self-published books are not. Single-author and collaborative books are eligible; anthologies are not. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. Books must be in English, but translations are eligible. In the case of translations that also contain the poems in the original language, those pages will not count toward the total page count.
Any works that have already won 1st-3rd place in the preceding year are ineligible.
The annual Dwarf Stars award, voted on by members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, recognizes the best speculative poem of 1–10 lines published in the previous year.
The award is designed to honor excellent scifaiku, tanka, cinquains, and other types of short poems that tend to be overshadowed in SFPA’s Rhysling Award competition.
