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This podcast is part of our 2016 fund drive bonus issue! Read more about Strange Horizons' funding model, or donate, here.


Direct link: 2016 Fund Drive poetry (MP3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents poetry from the 2016 Fund Drive bonus content.

  • “Passing Fair" by Shweta Narayan, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Shweta here.
  • “Million-Year Elegies: Oviraptor" by Ada Hoffman, read by Romie Stott. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Ada here.
  • “Classification of Folktales" by Margaret Wack, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Margaret here.
  • “swallowing the earth" by Karin Lowachee, read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Karin here.



Ada Hoffmann is the author of The Outside and Monsters in My Mind. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's, and Uncanny. She is a computer scientist, a classically trained soprano, and an autistic self-advocate. You can find her online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/ or on Twitter at @xasymptote.
Ciro Faienza (pronounced CHEE-roh) is an American/Italian national. He has acted on stages and screens throughout Texas and Massachusetts, and his work as a filmmaker has shown at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Hub Theater, and the National Gallery, London. His fiction is featured in numerous publications, including Daily Science Fiction and Futuristica, Vol 1. His short story "J'ae's Solution" was a top finalist in PRI's 3-Minute Futures Contest. You can see his visual artwork at his web gallery, Postmedium.
Karin was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel Warchild won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild (2002) and her third novel Cagebird (2005) were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams and Ann VanderMeer. Online she can be found at karinlowachee.com and twitter.com @karinlow.
Margaret Wack is a writer, poet, and classicist whose work has been published in Strange Horizons, Liminality, Twisted Moon, and others.  More can be found at margaretwack.com.
Romie Stott is the administrative editor and a poetry editor of Strange Horizons, and author of the horror novel Nothing in the Basement (Dybbuk Press, 2025). Romie's poems have appeared in inkscrawl, Dreams & Nightmares, Polu Texni, On Spec, The Deadlands, and Liminality, and elsewhere. You can find her fairly complete bibliography here. Outside of poetry, she is best known for her essays in Atlas Obscura, and short stories in Analog and Tractor Beam. 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, and is on YouTube as @romiesays. She is half of the electronica duo Stopwalk, and is the playwright behind the musicals "First, Contact" and The Lady Takes the Mic.
Shweta Narayan was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. They feel kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Mithila Review, Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables, Lightspeed: Queers Destroy Fantasy, and Clockwork Phoenix 3, among others. Shweta was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Nebula Awards.
Current Issue
10 Aug 2026

the sleeping are so hard to distinguish / from the dead
We'd only lived in Arizona four years—it was our retirement place. But I'd died there, and she'd dumped my ashes out in the desert without fanfare, without any poem or prayer, unless you considered, “Jesus, Marty, don't leave me. Why'd you leave me, you old bastard" to be an elegy.
Nature, desecrated, refused to yield more than bone
Strange Horizons is looking to add an additional social media editor and a Patreon editor to our editorial collective. These roles will entail working in tandem with our existing social media editor, Isana Skeete, our fundraising editor, Josh Kidd, and our management team. 
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