Another year has passed! That means even more fascinating poetry, short fiction, and essays across the breadth of fandom have emerged!

I haven’t done a great deal in 2019, mostly because I’m incredibly busy working on things that are not yet finished–but I can’t wait to share more of those! I also can’t wait to take it a little bit easier with myself, which is also a big reason why there isn’t a good deal more poetry or fiction on this list.

Regardless, here’s what I’ve been up to in 2019:

The Magazine (eligible for the Best Semiprozine Hugo):

🔥 FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, executive editors Troy L. Wiggins and DaVaun Sanders, editors L.D. Lewis, Brandon O’Brien, Kaleb Russell, Danny Lore, and Brent Lambert

FIYAH is eligible in the Best Semiprozine category. Both Troy L. Wiggins and DaVaun Sanders are eligible in the Best Editor, Short Form category. 🔥🔥🔥

Poetry (eligible for the Rhysling Award):

🌌 ‘Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast’, Uncanny Magazine Issue Twenty-Eight, May/June 2019

It’s funny how nobody asks about the spell,
who uttered it, or why; or why, pray tell,
we guess the boy-turned-beast was always beast-as-boy.

(Some) Other Poetry (That May Or May Not Also Be Rhysling-Eligible):

🌌 ‘Traveling Trini at Magic Camp 2019’, Patreon, August 31 2019

Every escalator is the first line of a portal story,
each queue its unwieldy next sentence,
but each of us is engrossed, all made of witness…

🌌 ‘Wolf’s Luck’, Twitter, October 17 2019

We came to play games.
Or to howl—to howl against
the pixelated woods, the pale woods,
the woods where we cannot be seen
as often as we howl…

Prose (eligible for the Hugo and Nebula Short Story categories) :

🌌 ‘Due By the End of the Week’, Fireside Quarterly January 2019 (available online February 2019)

“My problem? My problem is that I can’t afford to fail Sociology, or else I won’t be able to do any more of this.” I gesture at the dead slimy centipodal alien angrily, then lean my hair into the only clean sink in the room.

Nonfiction:

🌌 ‘Getting Out of the Cold: Revisiting Toxic Masculinity in Lethal Weapon’, Fireside Quarterly October 2019 (available online December 2019)

Sometimes the things that teach us how to be men also turn men into tools.

🌌 ‘If You’ve Heard This One Before’, Uncanny Magazine November/December 2019

Often enough there is a paradox where the work that deliberately seeks to take people to task for the hostile ideologies that breed violent actions are also the works that make those ideologies and those actions seem trendy and fascinating to impressionable consumers, not because those consumers are ignorant or undiscerning, but because they’ve been primed. And there is no better example of that priming than—
—well, there are so many examples, it’s not even funny.

Podcasts (eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo):

🌌 The Skiffy and Fanty Show, produced by Jen Zink and Shaun Duke, hosted by Jen Zink, Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, Alex Acks, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Trish Matson, and team

Alongside making literal dozens of rad things on a monthly basis, such as Reading Rangers and Torture Cinema, The Skiffy and Fanty Network is responsible for producing Righteous Kicks, the podcast where Iori Kusano and I talk about Kamen Rider! But if you’re going to put it on a ballot, definitely credit the whole team—Skiffy and Fanty does so many amazing things, and all of them are deserving of your attention.

Stuff The Eligibility Of Which Still Eludes Me:

Here’s a reminder that I make tabletop games! You can get some of them at my itch.io page! Considering that they are all very small, I am not going to assume their eligibility for stuff like the Nebulas, but it would be really nice if you checked them out all the same!

And that should be all from me! Thank you for your time, and I hope you are the best at everything.

Another year brings with it another crop of radical stories worth reading from all across the speculative fiction landscape. It’s also been a kind of a hard year for all of us, one where what we read and write has become in a lot of ways the truest shape of extolling who we want to be and rebutting who we are afraid of becoming. 

A lot of that has particularly come from many of the things that I’ve read, which I want to turn into another post where I can truly talk about the length and breadth of good SFF that came out in the year 2018. 

It’s also been an intensely busy one for me creatively. Lots of things were either published or cooking this year, which I’m somewhat glad for. If I’m being honest, it’s rather ironic that I wrote so much in a state of such mental and emotional flux that today, in another one of those valleys, I find it hard to just write the blog post about the stuff I wrote so people can read them and possibly consider them worthy of a statue. But ultimately, I’m proud of my output. That I can use my work as a channel for some of those valleys, and at least work slowly through the words when the valley fills with water, is a marked improvement from just last year. And ultimately, I came out with some things that I’m really proud of, and I hope I can make more things like those next year. 

But since I should also mention the things themselves, here are some stuff that fell out of my brain this year: 

One of the simple joys of my career is that, because I work with other freelance literary creators, we get to be novel in the ways we approach the same projects we’ve been engaged in for most of our work. As a teaching artist with The 2 Cents Movement, that means that our yearly nationwide secondary school tours get to be wildly varied projects, from the comical and narratively disjointed to the tragic and emotionally intense. 

It also means that, even when someone’s come to us to say, “We’d like you to solve this problem for us,” we’re trusted to find those solutions in our own ways. So when the Ministry of Community Development, Culture, and The Arts came to 2 Cents asking for us to continue our work on the National Patriotism Month tour they’ve usually performed, we were more than eager to take them up on the project, but were even more eager to try something new.

National Patriotism Month is a fairly recent observance in Trinidad and Tobago, but to me it serves a radically necessary social purpose. Between the dates of Independence Day and Republic Day, the Ministry aims to promote national cultural and heritage milestones to the public in the hope of raising national morale and reinforcing a national commitment to our twin-island home. Its festivities most often include using the performing arts to remind us of our greatest historical moments and their importance, and how they not only formed the definition of our national identity but, in more ways than many of us know, shaped international history or served as some of its most radical unsung moments.

The assumptions people typically make of the past are really stiff and unappetizing. No matter what radical things you may know about in your national history, the act of revisiting it is often done dully and without much engagement. Imagine someone performing a poem about the fact that an old man you don’t know who has long since been dead did a cool thing that doesn’t immediately impact your life. Imagine being asked, being begged, to care about this thing so external to your experience that you can barely be inspired to connect long enough to remember the person’s name at all.

The team lead for this year’s patriotism tour, Arielle John, shared this feeling about that quandary. So did 2 Cents Artistic Director Derron Sandy, who has been doing the same tour as far back as 2016, and hoped for a way to help students attach even more eagerly to our historical narratives. How could we bridge both gaps—how to deliver this year’s theme of ‘Legacy Is Me’ in a way that inspires young people to value their own commitment to nation-building, and make these histories more engaging for young people—in one short, concise tour?

Being the one speculative poet on the team, I pitched the first thing that  immediately came to mind: 

what if… time travel? 

Hey there! I may not have a lot to show for how busy I’ve been in the past few days–lots of performance preparations and private writing sprints to make some short things longer. But here are some things you can look out for in the future: 

• I’m one of the commissioned poets for Year Five of Uncanny Magazine! Uncanny is one of my favourite genre outlets, and I’m really glad that they would have me on board. The Kickstarter for Year Five is still on–you can check it out here! If you’re into it, at one of the pledge levels I’ll give you a poetry manuscript critique! (Also, psst, they’re open for subs, but I’mma just tell you that window closes quick so get on it!)
• I’ve also already contributed to some other Kickstarter campaigns! I have an essay and some poetry coming up in The Outliers, the companion zine to the splitbook for Avery Alder’s Dream Askew and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s Dream Apart. I can’t wait for you to see the zine, and the book itself! Both games are radical in every sense of the word. 
• I’m also presently cooking up poetry for the launch of John Silence, a weird-fiction RPG about psychic detectives of colour warding off interdimensional beings as nonviolently as possible. I’m having a lot of fun thinking deeply about this, and taking my time, but I think you’ll like what comes of it. 
• Also, expect some more of Ben Paragraph choosing his words wisely in the next installment of How to Unmake It in Anglia, coming soon. If you want a sense of what this serial novel is all about, I did an interview with the publisher, Scott Gable of Broken Eye Books, that you can read here.
• In the meantime, I have a poem in the July-September issue of CULTUREGO Magazine. It’s called ‘Gretels’, and it’s about how unsuspecting the fearsome things are. If you wish, you can read it from the site demo for free, but the entire magazine is definitely worth a read.

There are other things that are yet unknown, but I am sure you’ll like… some of them? In the meantime, let me just point you to a project by my friend and comrade-in-the-word, Shivanee Ramlochan.

Other Kinds of Men is a speculative poetry reader she’s undertaking on her blog, where each day in August she endeavours to read, discuss, and share a speculative poem by another poet. As a speculative poet myself, I’m always eager to see my favourite genre verse shared with others, but I’m also so absolutely pleased by her selections, especially the ones that I hadn’t read before. Shivanee is one of the deepest readers I have ever had the luxury of knowing, and I hope especially that those of you who may not know what speculative poetry is or what it can do will peruse this list–I can guarantee you that you will find something you love so much that you will hold it close against you as it opens a gate to another world.

And it should also go without saying that if you haven’t read Shivanee’s debut collection, Everyone Knows I Am A Haunting, then you should fix this severe self-injustice as immediately as you can. It’s an absolutely arresting little volume, one of which I insist everyone should have a copy, worn at the outer corners by rereading. 

So that’s all I have to say tonight, I think–wait! Also, if you’re into talking about your favourite fandom things with nice, respectful, considerate nerd strangers, I have a Discord server that I’m slowly populating! Join it and talk me in/out of hosting a large rewatch of Voltron: Legendary Defender as I fight the urge to write an entire treatise on Takashi Shirogane!