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Direct link: April poetry (MP3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the April issues.

  • “Minions" by Bryan Thao Worra, read by Anaea Lay. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Bryan Thao here.
  • “Eating Verse" by Akua Lezli Hope, read by Romie Stott. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Akua Lezli here.
  • “Propagation" by Layla Al-Bedawi, read by Romie Stott. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Layla here.
  • “Neither/Nor" by Alleliah Nuguid, read by Anaea Lay. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Alleliah here.



Akua Lezli Hope's manuscript, Them Gone, won Red Paint Hill's Editor's Prize and will be published in 2016.  She won the Science Fiction Poetry Association's 2015 short poem award. Her awards include fellowships from NYFA, Ragdale, Hurston Wright and the NEA. She has published more than 100 crochet patterns.
Alleliah Nuguid is from Fremont, California.  She is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Boston University. Her poems can be found in Permafrost, The New York Times Learning Blog, Poets 11, and, anonymously, in an unauthorized biography of a 2011 San Francisco mayoral candidate.
Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she writes, cooks, plays board games, reads too much, and questions the benevolence of the universe. Her work has appeared in many places including Apex, Penumbra, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Nightmare. She lives online at anaealay.com.
An award-winning Laotian American writer, Bryan Thao Worra holds a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professional member of the Horror Writer Association and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. In 2012 he was a Cultural Olympian representing Laos during the London Summer Games. His work has been featured internationally, including the Smithsonian traveling exhibit "I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story," the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Parnassus during the 2012 London Summer Games.
Layla Al-Bedawi is a poet, writer, and bookbinder (among other things). English is her third language, but she's been dreaming in it for years. Born in Germany to Kurdish and Ukrainian parents, she currently lives in Houston, TX, where she co-founded Fuente Collective and champions experimentation, collaboration, and hybridity in writing an other arts. Her work is published in Liminal Stories, Mithila Review, Bayou Magazine, Crab Fat Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at laylaalbedawi.com and @frauleinlayla.
Romie Stott is the administrative editor and a poetry editor of Strange Horizons. Her poems have appeared in inkscrawl, Dreams & Nightmares, Polu Texni, On Spec, The Deadlands, and Liminality, but she is better known for her essays in The Toast and Atlas Obscura, and a microfiction project called postorbital. As a filmmaker, she has been a guest artist of the National Gallery (London), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), and the Dallas Museum of Art. You can find her fairly complete bibliography here.
Current Issue
24 Mar 2025

The winner is the one with the most living wasps
Every insect was a chalk outline of agony / defined, evaluated, ranked / by how much it hurt
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Reprise by Samantha Lane Murphy, read by Emmie Christie. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life.  Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live
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