 I have a new poem up today at Mithila Review! "We're Refugees Who Found Love Searching for Atlantis" is a pantoum poem that first appeared in Italian in my chapbook Numinose Lapidi from Kipple Press. I am very honored that Mithila Review agreed to publish the English and Italian version, translated by the late Marco Raimondo.
Marco was an Italian translator of poetry who died due to complications surrounding his disability. Before he died, we discussed my sending out poems from the book so that they could be read together, and it was a dream of his to be published in magazines. I am honored to fulfill that dream today. Also, you can listen to me read the English version aloud in this publication :) Read it here . . .
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 I’m reading the poetry book submissions for Interstellar Flight Press, it occurs to me that a lot of writers struggle to put together poems for a collection. But when the right congregation of poems appears, it’s so exciting as an editor. Poems, when collected, have the ability to speak to each other in new and interesting ways not explored in their individuality. Read the full article here . . .  I am sharing excerpts from my new poetry chapbook over on my Instagram page, so I thought I would combine them here for easy reading. I will update this as new translations come in! My new chapbook is called Numinose Lapidi and it will be published soon by Kipple Press. Read the full article here . . .  Every year at the end of the year I post a review of all the articles, poems, stories, and books I’ve published that year. 2019 was a big year for me in writing. While I felt like I wasn’t getting a lot done, I was surprised when I looked back and realized I really had written a great deal.
Most of my time was spent working on two novels-in-progress. But I did manage to send out some poems for publication too. I’m very honored by the editors who recognized and published my work. Here’s to 2020 and another year of writing. Books Glimmerglass Girl — Won the Elgin Award for best speculative chapbook Numinous Stones — To be published in Italian in 2020 by Kipple Press Poems The 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Contest, Winner: Short Form Category: The Fox and the Forest (Erasure of Ray Bradbury) The 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Contest, Winner: Long Form Category: The Mining Town Apparition Lit #8 (October 2019) — Belly of the Beast Mirror Dance Issue 44 (Spring 2019) — Farewell Dead Men Not One of Us #61 (April 2019) — A Book Is a Tomb and Words Are Souls The Avenue: Issue V: Music (April 2019) — Chopin Falls in Love with the Night (1827–1846) The Knicknackery Issue 6 (February 2019) — Bayou Dream Dreams & Nightmares Magazine (Issue #111, January 2019) — An Unknowing Breach of the Law Kaleidotrope (Winter 2019) — “All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell” On Writing: Medium (12/18/19) — My NaNoWriMo Was a Mess Writing Hacks (11/27/19) — Tricking Yourself into Writing Bulletproof Writers (11/28/19) — The End of the Year Sometimes Sucks for Creatives Storymaker (11/25/19) — Reluctantly Writing About Death Interstellar Flight Press (11/15/19) — Defying Genre in The Dream House Daily Muse Books (10/24/19) — NaNoWriMo Isn’t Just for Books Medium (10/15/19) — Does Publishing Short Stories Matter? Medium (9/4/19) — The Writing Life: An Infographic Medium (8/28/19) — 40 Writing Milestones to Celebrate Medium (8/21/19) — Queries, Contributors, and Common Terms: An A-Z glossary for submitting writing Horror Writer’s Association Newsletter (7/1/19) — Darkness & Light Medium (5/16/19) — Fighting Rejection & Imposter Syndrome Medium (5/3/19) — Switching Genres Medium (4/3/19) — Creating a Writer’s Mission Statement Medium (3/27/19) — NaPoWriMo: A Poet’s Challenge Dream Foundry (3/14/19) — The Cone of Silence Medium (3/11/19) — These are a Few of My Favorite Rejections Medium (1/31/19) — Forming a Critique Group 101 If you are a member of the SFPA, my poems are eligible for the Rhysling Award. Click here to download a PDF version for reading.  A year and a few months ago, my father died. Today, I signed a contract for a small poetry book on grief and dealing with my father’s death that is going to be translated into Italian and published in Italy. The world spins in weird ways, I guess. Before my father died, I always looked on books about the death of a loved one in, I’ll admit, a pretty messed up and slightly dismissive way. I hated cancer memoirs, books that dived headfirst into the nitty-gritty details of death: bodies and hospitals and medicine and the grotesque humanity of grief. Also, there was a connotation with these books. When they were written by women about caring for loved ones, they often got lumped into women’s fiction, whereas a man writing about grief was somehow reinventing the wheel. Read the full article on Medium . . .  I am honored to announce that my chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl, is the winner of the 2019 SFPA Elgin Award for best speculative poetry chapbook. I am grateful to the SFPA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association) voting members for supporting this little book of weird poems about womanhood. Get your copy here . . .  Today is the one year book anniversary of Glimmerglass Girl, my first chapbook. This little book taught me a lot about being a writer & learning to love what you do. I learned that chapbooks are just as much work to promote as full length poetry books. I learned that getting a lot of interviews doesn't necessarily mean sales. But mostly, I learned that it's really scary to promote something personal, something you love, and that the writing community is one giant group of amazing, supportive people. Won't you consider buying it? It would make my year to sell out the remaining copies. 
I am on the radio today reading poetry! If you're in Houston you can catch my segment in the 2019 edition of Voices and Verses on Houston Public Media. Click above to listen!
In this sound portrait, Walrath describes how she fell in love with poetry in high school, her love of the weird and her inspirations. She reads her poem, “Blue Cadillac.” Blue Cadillac Oh, the way you sat in the drive, taking it all up. I climbed into your cool interior, sliding across the widest, darkest navy seats spread beyond me, beyond my vision. They seemed to expand and dissolve into a bright light on the driver’s side. We drove, through endless lanes of white picket fences, long green, green lawns, the Texas sun staccato in the trees, and it may be that I wore an Easter Sunday dress, all laced in white, and bows on my tights, or white slumping socks above black buckle shoes shining with polish. And in the heat of a Texas summer, how you could swallow me up in your blue dusty smell, that sweet sweet tobacco tucked into the glove compartment beside a lady’s silver lighter. For the sun merely seemed to enclose you, a line of gold light above the leather dash. But the very roundness of you, round seats and silver knobs and panels like porthole windows into another time, but mostly the round, stitched-leather steering wheel which was surely made for white driving gloves. And somehow in this memory of you, your massive lines like some primordial behemoth long since dead and buried in ice, the very blueness of you, I may have remembered myself, another classic beauty. This poem was published in my chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl. 
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About the AuthorHolly Lyn Walrath is a freelance editor and author of poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction. Find her on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath
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