Tuesday, June 21, 2016

2016 Rhysling Award Winners Announced


The Rhysling Anthology Editor and Award Chair, Charles Christian, and the officers of the Science Fiction Poetry Association have announced the winners of the 2016 Rhysling Awards. The Science Fiction Poetry Association was founded in 1978 to bring together poets and readers interested in science-fiction poetry.

The Science Fiction Poetry Association offers annual awards for speculative poetry:
The Rhysling Awards recognize individual poems.
The Dwarf Star Awards are given for short-short poems.
The Elgin Awards are presented for genre poetry books and chapbooks.

Each year, the SFPA publishes the Rhysling Anthology, comprised of works nominated by its international membership for the Best Poems of the Year.


The Rhyslings were first established in 1978, named for the blind poet Rhysling in Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “The Green Hills of Earth.” Rhysling’s skills were said to rival Rudyard Kipling’s. In real life, Apollo 15 astronauts named a crater near their landing site “Rhysling,” which has since become its official name.


Winning works are regularly reprinted in the Nebula Awards Anthology from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Rhysling Awards are considered in the speculative literature field to be the poetry equivalent of the awards given for prose— achievement awards given to poets by the writing peers of their own field of literature.


This year, there were ties for first place and third place in the Long Poem category.

Short Poem Winners:1st Place
"Time Travel Vocabulary Problems" (Dreams and Nightmares)
by Ruth Berman

2nd place

“Tech Support for the Apocalypse” (Dreams and Nightmares)
by F. J. Bergmann

3rd Place 
“An Introduction to Alternate Universes: Theory and Practice” (Gyroscope Review)
by Sandra J. Lindow


Long Poem Winners:

1st Place (tie)
"It Begins with a Haunting" (Dance Among Elephants - Sahtu Press)
by Krysada Panusith Phounsiri

"Keziah" (Dark Energies - P'rea Press)
by Ann K. Schwader 

2nd Place
"Chronopatetic" (Dreams and Nightmares 100)
by F.J. Bergmann

3rd place (tie)
From "Sunspots" (Poetry, December 2015),
by Simon Barraclough

"The White Planet" (Boulevard 31:1),
by Albert Goldbarth

The Rhysling Award will be presented at DiversiCon, in St. Paul (Bandana Square Best Western) by SFPA Vice President, Sandra J. Lindow. All members are welcome to attend the ceremony. This year's theme is “Martians, Vulcans, and Women of Valor” with Guest of Honor Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and Special Guest Naomi Kritzer. Their Posthumous Guests are Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy and Shirley Jackson.

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