Le Guin Tribute Anthology: A Call for Submissions

Here is Rose Lemberg, on a volume to be published by Aqueduct Press:

Call for Submissions: Ursula K. Le Guin tribute poetry anthology

I am seeking submissions for an anthology of poetry in tribute to the life and works of Ursula K. Le Guin. The anthology is tentatively titled CLIMBING LIGHTLY THROUGH FORESTS, and it will be published by Aqueduct Press sometime in 2019.

Ursula K. Le Guin was perhaps most known for her SFF fiction, but she was a prolific poet, with a dozen poetry collections in print (her last poetry book is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press this Fall).

Unlike her big-idea SF, her poetry was often more personal in scope, engaging closely with land and landscape of the Pacific Northwest; much of her poetry is not speculative at all. Le Guin was a complex, prolific creator whose work influenced and touched so many of us.
For this anthology, I am seeking poetry that engages with Ursula K. Le Guin’s life and work broadly construed – including her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I will be looking for a variety of voices, themes, treatments, and approaches. Both critical and celebratory approaches are welcome, as is anything in-between.

You are welcome to engage with specific books and/or stories, or take it in other directions. Your poems do not have to be speculative, although a speculative element is always welcome. There are no length or style limitations. Very short and very long works are welcome. Experimental forms are welcome. Prose poetry is welcome. Rhymed and formal poetry is welcome. I truly welcome poetry of any kind. Please do not send me short stories or nonfiction, however.

As always, I am hoping to receive poetry from people from a variety of backgrounds. Everybody is welcome to submit! I welcome work from people who belong to marginalized/underrepresented groups and communities,  including from Black people, Indigenous people, and/or people of color, from migrants, from non-Western and non-Anglophone people, from disabled and neurodiverse people, from LGBTQIA+ people, from people of all genders. You do not need to be marginalized to submit. I welcome submissions from new and established voices, seasoned poets and people who never wrote poetry before. Please don’t self-reject!

Where to submit: Please submit up to 3 (THREE) poems to lembergsubmissions@gmail.com. If you are sending a reprint, please indicate where and when it was first published. Your submissions should be titled LE GUIN SUBMISSION: Your last name

Please do not submit more than 3 poems total for this call (you can send them together or separately).
Editorial form of address: since people ask me about this! “Dear Editor” is great.”Dear Rose” or “Dear R.” is also fine. Please don’t call me either Ms, Mr, or Mrs.

Payment: The tribute anthology is a paid opportunity: we are paying $20 per original poem. While I am primarily looking for original poetry, I will consider reprints as well (payrate for reprints TBD).

An important note on rejections: Ursula K. Le Guin’s work and life was important to many of us. It can be heartbreaking to receive a rejection for work that deeply matters to us. Unfortunately, I will only be able to fit a limited amount of poems, and I foresee some difficult decisions to come. Whatever the outcome of your submission will be, please rest assured that I will review it with utmost care, and that a rejection is not a reflection on yourself, your craft, or your personal connection to Ursula K. Le Guin’s work – but simply the reality of publishing.

Submissions period: the anthology is open to submissions (as of July 3rd, 2018), and it will be open to submissions till October 15th, 11:59 Central. I will let you know within 90 days of submission whether your work is accepted, rejected, or held for further consideration.
I’m looking forward to reading your work!

Poets House Showcase

This year two of Aqueduct's recent poetry titles, Jean LeBlanc's A Field Guide to the Spirits and Rose Lemberg's Marginalia to Stone Bird are appearing in Poet House's annual Showcase. Here's the description from the Poets House website:

The only event of its kind, the annual Poets House Showcase is a free exhibit featuring the new poetry books and poetry-related texts published in the United States in a single year from over 700 commercial, university and independent presses. Displaying volumes by individual authors, anthologies, chapbooks, biographies, critical studies, essay collections, CDs, DVDs, and more, the Poets House Showcase is a diverse and inclusive exhibition in which books from micro-presses receive the same care and attention as major publishers.

Opening on Thursday, July 14th, the 2016 Showcase is on view through Saturday, August 20, 2015. More than 3,000 items are in the 2016 exhibition.


If you live in NYC and are a poetry lover, this may well be for you.

(Photos furnished by Jean Le Blanc.)

Rose Lemberg's Marginalia to Stone Bird

I'm pleased to announce the release of Marginalia to Stone Bird as the forty-eighth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. In this powerful debut collection, Rannu Award-winning poet Rose Lemberg explores the deep-rooted fluidity of gender, tradition, language, and desire in landscapes as familiar as high fantasy and as foreign as San Francisco. Written in the voices of immigrants, shape-changers, sentient ships in a distant future and heroes of a mythic past, her poems inhabit a fragile, vital space of complex identity and story as a conscious act, stubbornly urging the reader's attention toward the marginal, the liminal, and the unheard—a firebird cautioned to burn less brightly, a ghost-child ignored by the gods, a lover laying a road of words for a beloved to follow. By turns devastating and deeply hopeful, Marginalia to Stone Bird writes a fearless commentary on our history and others.

It is available now from Aqueduct Press in both print and e-book editions here.

Stuff of Interest

--The Weird Review has not only posted a review of The Moment of Change, but also reprinted two of its poems. Reviewer Adam Mills characterizes the anthology as "a collection of works so extensive, dense, and intense that it expands the space it is placed within and makes a territory for itself."

 --The Future Fire has posted a review of Kiini Ibura Salaam's Ancient, Ancient. Reviewer Martha Hubbard writes, "Throughout the language is stunning, like music become words. I found my own mind dazzled and my imagination stretched to keep up with the flow of images. The story that spoke most strongly to me was that of ‘Marie’, a young Creole woman who has gradually become disconnected from her Louisiana home and her family identity."

 --The AALBC has also posted a review of Ancient, Ancient. Reviewer Emanuel Carpenter is a bit uncomfortable with its fantastic and science-fictional elements-- "If you haven’t been exposed to this type of writing, which can be described as African storytelling with a touch of poetic verse, erotica, science fiction and spiritual themes, then each story may indeed have you scratching your head and asking questions. Questions like: What’s up with the moths? Was that really a part snake, part human? What’s up with all the poetry?"-- even as he likes the book (and calls it a "page-turner"): "The stories in this book are sensual, unique, and thought-provoking. In fact, it’s easy to imagine many of the stories as the basis for short films instead of a book. Many of the stories that deal with issues of sexuality, desire, and even revenge (including some not mentioned in this review) will have you wishing they were expanded into a novel."

 --Sofia Samatar has reviewed Ellen Klages's In the House of the Seven Librarians for Strange Horizons. She characterizes the physical book thus: "Since the story takes place in such a library, the illustrations are more than padding: they cast a shadow of the world we know into the enchanted realm of the rather special Carnegie Library in the tale. Even with the illustrations, however, the book is small. You could put it into the envelope of a birthday card. It feels like a gift, and it would make a good one, because the story is delightful. Like other magical small spaces—the wardrobes and rabbit holes of fantastic literature—Klages's House is bigger on the inside." -

-Wired's Recovered 1927 Metropolis Film Program Goes Behind the Scenes of a Sci-Fi Masterpiece is worth checking out: "A remarkable 32-page theater program from Metropolis’ 1927 debut has surfaced at a well-known rare book shop in London, which scanned it and shared some pages with Wired. The program was created for the premiere of Metropolis at London’s Marble Arch Pavilion, and it’s packed with firsthand anecdotes from the making of the movie, and some stunning photographs. Only three surviving copies of this program are known to exist, according to the Peter Harrington rare book shop, which has its copy on sale for 2,750 pounds ($4,244). (All 32 pages are available for viewing.) The program reveals the intriguing backstory behind the German sci-fi epic, as told from the perspective of Lang, his wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou, and several members of the cast and crew."

 --New York Magazine has posted an essay by Frank Rich on the media's reaction to actor Andy Griffith's death to mourn not Griffith's passing but his role's being "one of the last links to another, simpler time" and a repository of “values which actually transcended the deep divides which tore the nation apart during the years the show aired from 1960 to 1968.” "In reality," Rich writes, "The Andy Griffith Show didn’t transcend the deep divides of its time. It merely ignored them." Rich then examines some of the narratives of American decline now flourishing, particularly the right wing's accusations against the Obama Administration and the reintroduction of the claims for American exceptionalism by Sarah Palin in 2008:

Once Obama was elected, American exceptionalism became as Palin had defined it—a proxy for the patriotism that the new president lacked. From there, it took just a rhetorical sleight-of-hand to link Obama’s deficiency of Americanism to America’s advancing decline. The conflation was consummated by Charles Krauthammer in an influential October 2009 article for The Weekly Standard titled “Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy.” To make his case, he leaned on an Obama quote from a press conference at a NATO conference in Strasbourg, France, that spring. In response to a question from Edward Luce, a Financial Times reporter (and himself the author of a subsequent declinist tome subtitled America in the Age of Descent), the president had answered, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In Krauthammer’s view, this was proof that Obama was endorsing American decline, for “if everyone is exceptional, no one is.”

Since then it’s been pile-on time on the right, usually with that one Obama quote brandished as the smoking gun. The president is constantly being lashed for his lack of commitment to American exceptionalism, much as he was slapped around during the 2008 campaign for not at first slavishly donning a flag lapel pin. Newt Gingrich helped lead the way with a campaign book titled A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters; he explained that he is an “American exceptionalist” because he believes in “fundamentally rebuilding the America we inherited,” as opposed to Obama, who “believes in fundamentally undermining the America we inherited.” Mitt Romney’s contribution to the genre, No Apology, is one long dirge for how America has lost its greatness in the Obama era’s bankrupt “reorientation away from a celebration of American exceptionalism.”

“On the right, the word ‘exceptional’—or ‘exceptionalism’—lately has become a litmus test” is how the columnist Kathleen Parker accurately characterized her fellow conservatives last year when chastising Obama for not obediently saying “that word ‘exceptional’ ” during his 2011 State of the Union address and instead “studiously” avoiding “the word conservatives long to hear.” The only flaw in her argument is that no American president has ever publicly referred to “American exceptionalism” in the more than eight decades since Stalin coined it—with the sole exception of Obama. According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara—a repository of all the presidents’ public words, eagerly mined by fact-checking bloggers in response to exceptionalism fetishists like Parker—George W. Bush did at least use exceptional in office, albeit twice in reference to his torpedoed Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why Obama, branded as an outlier to the “real America” by Palin in 2008, would be held to a different standard than his predecessors by a modern GOP that is almost as lily-white as Mayberry. But declinists not normally engaged in conservative partisan politics have fallen into the American-exceptionalism trap as well by buying wholeheartedly into the right’s elevation of Stalin’s coinage from near obscurity to a jingoistic buzz term. Murray writes that the country will be on the right track “only when we are talking again about why America is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional.” Friedman and Mandelbaum second the motion: American exceptionalism “has to be earned continually” and “is now in play.” Their intention may not be to join the right in tarring Obama with America’s collapse, but in this hothouse political climate that is the practical effect.

You can read the entire essay here.

Links for a Sunday afternoon

Summer officially arrived in the northern hemisphere this week, but Seattle's weather continues to be Spring-like, as though we've settled into mid-May weather for good. Which is all very pleasant, but I worry about my tomatoes and other hot-weather vegetables. (The lettuces and spinach and kales like it just fine, of course.)

I still haven't managed to write anything about WisCon for this blog. (Getting a bit late, I know...) I still hope to do that. In the meantime, here are some links.

--Versification has posted a review by Francesca Forrest of The Moment of Change. "Lemberg," she writes, "has chosen poems that represent the unruly, ungeneralizable expanse of human female experience."

--Electra at Starlady reviews Andrea Hairston's Mindscape-- and does so adopting the narrative form Andrea uses for character Lawanda Kitt's sections of the novel.

This is, in a way that I suspect many people would not want to really acknowledge, a truly American science fiction (science fantasy?) novel, and probably one of the few that I have read. Though there is a lot of Afro-futurism in here, there is also a lot of specifically American history, particularly the history of U.S.-Indian relations - born-again Sioux Ghost Dancers are central to the plot, and the final scenes take place at Wounded Knee. Furthermore, movies and a lot of Hollywood permeate the characters' lives and worldviews, as well as the fact that many of them are involved in movies as directors or actors or unwilling Extras. I liked the way that some of the characters were explicit about the fact that they didn't want to be co-opted into mainstream narratives, and probably my favorite character overall was Lawanda Kitt, a loud and proud ethnic throwback who shakes up the corrupt and rotting zone of Los Santos without fully realizing her own power, even though we only get her viewpoint in transmissions to various people. I didn't like Elleni quite so much, but by the end I understood her - indeed, one of the awesome things about this book is just how many awesome female characters there are.

--I've discovered a fantastic blog for high-quality local bird gossip: Union Bay Watch. Not only does the author, Larry, post his (and others') observations of avian life in Seattle, but he also provides spectacular photos (currently of eaglets and ongoing crow harassment of eagles, ospreys, and other larger birds) and very brief videos (for instance, of a Northern Flicker performing a mating dance). If you're at all interested in  birds, it's well worth checking out.

--A battle is under way at the University of Virginia between the board that governs the university (all of them--excepting the student representative-- the governor's political appointees who have contributed huge sums of money to political campaigns) on one side and the university's administration, faculty, and students on the other. To kick off its grand plan of turning the university into an online, for-profit diploma mill (explicitly, like Phoenix University), it fired the president of the university. I've been told of similar agendas at work on other campuses, but I've never heard of such a full-frontal assault quite like this one. The corporate-speak board members apparently conceive of themselves as enacting something known in the business world as "strategic dynamism." It's basically an embrace of instability as a way of ramming through measures of massive change before anyone has a chance of questioning much less thinking through the potential consequences of those measures. (Sort of like what happened in the US Government after the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as POTUS.) The board has also hired the notorious Hill+Knowlton Strategies to manage public perceptions of their machinations. Although the protests at the UVA campus are tremendous (as seen by the refusal to serve of the person the board appointed as the president pro-tem), the fact that it is summer makes it seem unlikely that the protests can be sustained. I also wonder how far the main source of protest-- the faculty-- will be willing to go in the struggle. Of course it is their jobs (and their workplace) that will eventually be on the line. But since lost jobs aren't imminent, and almost all notions of personal interest tend to be located in the short-term, my hopes aren't high.

A few links of interest

--Apex Magazine has an article by Tansy Rayner Roberts: Girl Meets House: Kitchen Sinks, Joanna Russ and the Female Gothic.

--Amal El-Mohtar, reflecting on the requirement of exceptionality for women characters in the 1970s Sandbaggers spy series, posts More Thoughts on Feminist Characters: Sandbaggers and Female Exceptionalism.

--Brit Mandelo reviews The Moment of Change for Tor.com. "These poems," she writes, "are howling, and they are whispering, and they are calmly—or madly—telling stories about what it means to be a woman, any kind of woman, any person who reaches out for the name “woman.” I appreciated the inclusivity of this text, and the concern with gathering in as many voices as possible to put them in tension and in conversation. Some of the best poems of the text—and, having heard them performed, I may be biased—are JT Stewart’s “Say My Name” and “Ceremony,” one short and one long, both poems dealing with issues of race, immigration, and self-definition Also, it goes without saying, but: they are beautiful, wrenching, astounding pieces. Which is not to say that the whole book isn’t fabulous, because it is. With enough time, I would review every single poem of the approximately 70 pieces included here." You can read the whole review here.

--Gary Trudeau distills the reality of sexual harassment and rape in the US military into 20 frames of his Doonesbury strip.

Call for poetry submissions

This is from Rose Lemberg, who's editing...

...a feminist speculative poetry reprint anthology from Aqueduct Press titled The Moment of Change (referencing Adrienne Rich's "The moment of change is the only poem")*. I hope this anthology will bring feminist questions to the foreground, while featuring queer poets, poets of color, and international poets as much as possible. My interpretation of speculative is pretty broad, as is my interpretation of feminism; please try me.

To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first feminist anthology within the history of speculative poetry (for a list of speculative poetry anthologies, follow the link).

To this end, I would like to solicit reprint submissions at the editorial address, feministspec at gmail dot com.  Submissions are not limited by gender and sexuality, age, race and ethnicity, disability, immigration status, etc - everyone is welcome. Please send me your previously published poems that you think are feminist (maximum 5 poems per submission, please). Date of original publication does not matter, but please supply the  previous publication details for each poem.

If you have ideas for poems by others that can fit the anthology, please let me know at the editorial address ( feministspec at gmail dot com).

Rights: We ask for non-exclusive one-time reprint rights, non-exclusive promotional rights, and non-exclusive ebook reprint rights. These rights should be available when you send me your submissions (i.e. if the poem is under exclusivity period somewhere, that would be problematic).

Payment: one copy per contributor.

Submissions are open now, and will remain open until June 15th, 2011. I will respond to all submissions by July 15th, 2011.

Please ask any questions here, and please spread the news! A static website is coming soon.

* Thanks to Rachel Swirsky (rachel_swirsky ) for suggesting this title!