Speculative Poetry

READINGS

Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series

2026

February 8, 2026

Speculative Poetry for Valentine’s Day

7pm to 8:15pm EST

Jennifer Crow

Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Akua Lezli Hope

Juan Manuel Perez

March

Starburst!

Women’s History Month

March 1                           Deborah Davitt

March 8                           Lisa Marie Wood

March 15                         Marie Brennan

March 22                         Mary Turzillo

March 29                         Angela Acosta

Juneteenth and the Black Fantastic

June 14th 2026

SpringWrites 2026

Owolabi Aboyade, 

Pop A. Mister E. Sol'Sax,

Linda Addison

Akua Lezli Hope
upfromsumdirt
 

National Disability Pride month

July 12, 2026

Akua Lezli Hope,
Ennis Rooks Bashe

John C. Mannone

Silvaticus Riddle NYC

Speculative Poetry Month

November 1        Beatriz F. Fernandez      Miguel Mitchell

November 8        Michael Payne              Rich Magahiz

November 15      Brian Garrison              Clarabell Miray Fields

November 22           Vivian Faith Prescott

2026 will be the seventh year for the Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series, having presented 55 hour long events including 84 poet readings since 2020.

About the Poets

For over a quarter of a century, Jennifer Crow has been writing speculative poetry with themes of love, wonder, and grief. With their roots in mythology, folklore, and scientific imagination, her poems have found homes in a wide variety of print and electronic venues. She won the 2023 Rhysling Award for short poetry for her poem "Harold and the Blood-Red Crayon." Her latest chapbook, Take Up Your Skin, features work that has appeared on her Patreon page at www.patreon.com/poetrycrow. Interested readers can catch up with her there or on Bluesky @writerjencrow.bsky.social.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA's Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/

Juan Manuel Pérez, a Mexican-American poet of Indigenous descent and the Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas (2019-2020), is the author of numerous poetry books including the recently released bilingual haiku collection, THE ENIGMATICAL SPHERE OF EL CHUPA-KU (Space Cowboy Books, 2025) as well as the award-wining, poetic-memoir, THIRTY YEARS AGO: LIFE AND THE FIRST GULF WAR (2023). Juan, a former migrant field worker, is also the 2021 Horror Authors Guild’s Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award winner and a recipient of a 2021 Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant. This poet’s credits also include a recent Honorable Mention in the Poetry Society Of Virginia’s 2025 Veterans Poetry Project/Edward W. Lull Memorial Contest, two International Latino Book Honorable Mention Awards (2025), one Regal Summit Book Award (2024), an Honorable Mention in the 2025 Inaugural War Poetry Postcard Contest, one Best Of The Net Nomination (2023), two Aphelion’s Best Poetry Of The Year Listings (2023, 2024), two Pushcart Prize Nominations (2017, 2023), three Elgin Book Award Nominations (2021, 2022, 2023), four Rhysling Award Nominations (2011, 2012, 2013, 2020), four Dwarf Star Award Nominations (2012, 2020, 2021, 2022) with one Honorable Mention win in 2022, and one H.E.R.O.I.C. People’s Choice Award Nomination (2024). To learn more about this award-winning poet, migrant field worker, combat vet, history teacher, and Native American Gourd Dancer, please check out his official website at: https://www.juanmperez.com/ .

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, From Voyages Unreturning, Xenoforming, and To Love Unquietly, please see www.deborahldavitt.com.  

Celebrated psychological horror author L. Marie Wood is the winner of multiple awards including the Bram Stoker Award®, the Golden Stake Award for Literature, and the International Impact Book Award. She is also a MICO Award-winning screenwriter, an Elgin Award finalist poet, an accomplished essayist, and a playwright. Wood is the President of the Horror Writers Association, the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, as well as a horror scholar. Learn more at www.lmariewood.com.

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She is the author of more than twenty novels, nearly one hundred short stories, and over a dozen poems; her poem "A War of Words" won the Hugo Award, and her novels and game writing have been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. As half of M.A. Carrick, she has also written the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy and the upcoming Sea Beyond duology. For social media links, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.
 

Mary A. Turzillo won a Nebula award ("Mars Is to Place for Children" 1999) and two Elgin awards (Sweet Poison, with Marge Simon, 2014, and Lovers & Killers, 2012, solo.) Her novel Mars Girls (Apex) features two young Martian women rescuing themselves from Face-on-Mars crazies. Her purrfectly delicious story collection Cosmic Cats & Fantastic Furballs appeared March 2022 from WordFire. A medal-earning woman épée fencer in the US in her age class, she lives with scientist-author-fencer Geoffrey Landis.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist and 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention. Her Rhysling and Best of the Net nominated poetry has appeared in Heartlines Spec, Worlds of Possibility, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and The Sprawl Mag.  She is author of the Elgin nominated poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). She has published articles on Spanish modernism in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies.  

Owólabi Aboyade is a multidimensional/ ancestral/silly-ass/Afrikan culture creator from Detroit. He/his craft is healing from the intergenerational trauma of having to hide his creative/spiritual power to survive. He is a poet/ essayist/ critic/hip hop artist (Will See) with six albums under his belt. His work has been recognized by the Odd Contest and the Science Fiction Poetry Association and anthologized in Nombono: Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators from Around the World. He is a regular contributor to Riverwise, Geez, Therapeutic Edgelands, and Against TheCurrent magazines. His poetry chapbook, Lee,Young Lee was published by AWE Society Press in the eventful summer of 2024. In 2025 he earned his MFA from Pacific University as a Kwame Dawes Mapmaker Fellow. 

Linda D. Addison is an award-winning author of five collections, including How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, recipient of HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Her 2025 books: Everything Endless written with Jamal J. Hodge; An Illegal Feast with Consuelo G. Flores, Andrea Goyan, Elizabeth Eve King & Elizabeth Wong. Find her work in: Waterborne anthology; Sauúti Terrors: The Dark Side; You, Human, Vol. 2; Spacefunk!

Site: https://www.LindaAddisonWriter.com

Pop A. Mr. E. Sol’Sax was born in 1969 in Kings County Hospital  the same hospital as His Mother, the poet Esther Louise. Her Geechee parents migrated to Brooklyn from South Carolina. Sol Sax’s Father was half Jamaican and half Cuban and had migrated to Bushwick,Brooklyn when he was 5 in 1950. Sol’Sax grew up in Bushwick and lived there during the peak of the crack epidemic and the rise of Hip Hop while He earned a BFA with honors from Cooper Union in 1992 and a MFA with honors from the Yale School of Art in 1995. Since 1991, Sol'Sax has been developing an American ancestral masquerade based on The West African ancestral masquerade called Egun gun.  Sol’Sax’s masqueraders are called “Sol’Sain’t” to celebrate the souls that ain’t here no more but live on  because of the African cultural retentions they used to resist European supremacist beliefs. Sol’Sax’s  work seeks to celebrate The West and Central African cultural contributions that are often overlooked but  are deeply rooted in the African American fight for Freedom. Sol’Sax is a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow in Sculpture, a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Sculpture and a 2023 BRIO Fellow. His work has been exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum, PS1 MoMA, and The New York Museum among other notable venues. In 2008 he completed a public commission for (New York) MTA Arts for Transit at the Halsey Street J train station in Bushwick, on the street he grew up on. 

Beatriz F. Fernandez is a Puerto Rican/Peruvian bilingual academic librarian based in Florida. She grew up in Philadelphia, Spain and mostly Puerto Rico.

She has an M.A. in English literature and has authored three chapbooks: Simultaneous States, (Bainbridge Island Press, 2025) The Ocean Between Us (Backbone Press, 2017) and Shining from a Different

Firmament (Finishing Line Press, 2015), which she presented at the Miami International Book Fair. She has read her work on WLRN, South Florida's

PBS/NPR station, and has been featured on their website several times. She began writing for publication after winning the grand prize in the 2nd annual Writer's Digest Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Strange Horizons,

Star*Line, Whale Road Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize four times in recent years.  In late 2025, she became the newest member of the Old Scratch Press Poetry  and Short Form writing collective and her full-length book of poetry. Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time  was just published by them this fall.

Beatriz began writing speculative poetry and fiction rather late in life, but her love of science fiction began at age 10 when she discovered the works of Andre Norton.  She lives in Miami with her husband, the astronomer James R. Webb,(and no, the James Webb Space Telescope is not named after him!)  

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Clarabelle Miray Fields is a Rhysling-nominated, award-winning speculative writer from Boulder, Colorado, who writes about feminism, scifi, ancient myth, and the many spaces in-between. Her work has appeared widely in print and online, with recent publications including credits in places such as Arcane Magick, Afterworld, SpecPoVerse, Belladonna’s Garden Lit, Corvid Queen, and Circe’s Cauldron, among others. 

Holding a BA in classical languages (summa cum laude, 2018) and a former Fulbright Summer Institute participant, Fields often draws on motifs from ancient stories to inform her work, especially through the lens of feminist revisionist myth. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Carmina Magazine, a publication dedicated to modern mythmaking. She also serves as staff poet-in-residence for Vinegar Press and appears regularly as a panelist on RoundTable 360, a monthly gathering of online creatives. 

Described as having a powerful stage presence, Fields frequently performs her work at a variety of open mic nights and festivals and is currently in the process of putting together several full-length poetry collections. Aside from writing, though, her favorite thing is being outdoors. When she isn’t working, you can usually find her outside, dark coffee (or dark beer) in hand, trailing after the stars. 

Brian U. Garrison is President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. His chapbook Micropoetry for Microplanets earned 3rd Place in the 2025 Elgin Awards. His poetry has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Radon Journal, Science Write Now, Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, and elsewhere. He has been invited to present at numerous events and reading series. He co-edited Rhysling Anthology in 2022 and 2024, and is the current Managing Editor of Eye to the Telescope. 

Inspiration for his writing comes from his interest in computer science and A.I. that ultimately manifested as degrees in psychology and neuroscience. Poetry posters with his words and designs can be ordered from bugthewriter.etsy.com. He lives under a tall, leafy tree in Portland, Oregon. Find him online at bugthewriter.com.

Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He's spent much of his time wrangling computers as a day job but now when he's not making music he is writing. His work has received nominations for Rhysling, Dwarf Stars, Pushcart, and Best of the Web awards. His chapbook collection The Reducing Flame was published in 2025. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/.

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Miguel O. Mitchell, PhD (he/his/him) is a Black speculative poet, science fiction and fantasy author, visual artist, and retired chemist. Miguel's poems can be found in Amazing Stories, Dreams & Nightmares, Eye to the Telescope, FIYAH, Sauuti Terrors anthology, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, Scifaikuest, Star*Line, Space and Time,  and Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2022). He also published two poetry collections, the science fiction novel-in-verse Surrealia (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2024), which won Second Place in the 2025 Elgin Awards for Best Full-Length Speculative Poetry Book, and the fully illustrated Periodic Table of Alien Species: Elements 1-86 (Barnes & Noble Press, 2021). 

In editorial roles, Miguel was Editor of the 2025 Dwarf Stars Anthology, Co-editor (with David C. Kopaska-Merkel) of the 2023 Dwarf Stars Anthology, and is Editor-in-Chief of SpecPoVerse: An International Journal of Speculative Poetry.

2020 8 events      8 poets

2021 13 evets      13 poets

2022 4 events      8 poets

2023 7events       7 poets

20249 events       18 poets

2025 14 events    30 poets