Yesterday for the first time the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) held an award ceremony to announce this year’s winners of the Dwarf Stars, Rhysling, and Elgin Awards.  The online event included readings of the award-winning poems or book excerpts, with many read by the award winners themselves.  Whether you already enjoy speculative poetry or are simply curious and don’t know where to start, watching the recording is a great way to hear high caliber verse, as recognized by practitioners and peers in the organization.  Congratulations to all of the 2026 recipients! 

This year’s Elgin Award chairs gave me the tremendous honor of reading on behalf of David C. Kopaska-Merkel, whose chapbook Risk Assessment placed 3^rd in the Elgin Award but who, sadly, passed away earlier this year.  It was a tremendous loss for the speculative poetry community.  David was in fact the leader who founded the Elgin Awards, among his many other contributions to the SFPA and beyond.  M. Frost (this year’s Elgin Award winner for best poetry chapbook!), wrote a touching tribute to David.  I encourage you to read it. 

Here it is, the cover of Extra Lives in Verse, my video game poetry book and passion project since COVID!  It features lovely, lovely pixel art by Falah Zaidan.  I couldn’t be happier. 

Here’s the publisher’s description: 

“In this poignant collection, the poet draws parallels from her own life to the video games that shaped her over the years. Come along as she uncovers the pentiment in a medieval Bavarian monastery, disappears from a relationship like a Pac-munched ghost, goes grocery shopping with digital megalomaniacs, solidifies love on the high seas, and collects chaos emeralds along the way.”

The book is available for preorder now from Manawaker Studio.  It officially comes out on November 13^th.  You can view the latest press release here. 

This Saturday, Oct. 17^th, from 2-5pm, join me and members of the Oregon Chapter of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) for the 3^rd annual Meet a Horror Author event at the Beaverton City Library!  I always look forward to this one.  It’s right in my hometown, and we always get a great lineup of readers.  This year, come meet me, Richard Leis, Niyyah Ruscher-Haqq, H. A. Spector, Stephanie Feldstein, Andrew S. Fuller, and Iris Harris.  We’ll have books for sale, candy for the taking, and lots of spooky stories and poems. 

I’ll be posting again soon with exciting news about my upcoming book, Extra Lives in Verse… 

Get ready to be unmade.  Scratch that, there is no ready. 

My new poem “Papier-mâché in Reverse” is part of the annual HWA Poetry Showcase, available now.  This year’s book is Volume XIII, lucky 13.  I could imagine little as unlucky as powerlessness and loss of self, especially given everything going on in the world.  Hence, my latest poem.  Thank you to this year’s judges and editor for including it. 

It’s official!  I’ve signed the contract for my debut full-length poetry collection, forthcoming from Interstellar Flight Press!  It’ll have a mix of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and even a dash of non-speculative autobiographical poetry.  It’ll have a range of forms and lengths.  There’s not much more I can share at this point, but I’ll keep you posted. 

In the meantime, you’ll be hearing more about my other forthcoming poetry book, the chapbook Extra Lives in Verse from Manawaker Studio.  Things are moving fast on that one.  Yesterday I got a sneak preview of the cover art, and it’s gorgeous! 

I have another poetry reading in Portland, this one coming up on Friday, Oct. 2^nd, at 6:30pm at BOLD Coffee & Books.  I’ll be reading along with Brian U. Garrison and Richard Leis at the Get Speculative! Poetry Night.  It’s free to attend, with books and refreshments available for purchase.  Once again, I hope you can come, enjoy some cool poetry, and support the venue! 

From the event page:

“Come hear what the poets are talking about: hopeful futures, video games, and the weird fears underneath it all. Three local writers share new words and crowd favorites. Brian U. Garrison’s latest chapbook, The Future is Antifascist, is a reminder for folks to confirm their voter registration. Katherine Quevedo’s forthcoming book, Extra Lives in Verse, puts a new spin on pixels. Richard Leis works on an active Mars mission and will read from his speculative and dark poetry.” 

I’m planning a completely different selection of poetry for each of my October readings.  I might even unveil some poems that are forthcoming… 

My sword & sorcery story “Shades of Bruises and Blood” has moved out from behind the paywall!  You can read it now online in Trollbreath Magazine (although I encourage you to consider subscribing so you don’t have to wait for all the amazing fiction and poetry in each issue). 

I shared earlier about the origins of this story.  One thing I hadn’t mentioned is that, while doing research for it, I called up my dad, a retired geotechnical civil engineer, to ask him about the conditions for the opening scene.  It was great fun to try applying just a smidge of his knowledge of landslides and seismic activity to a fantasy setting. 

It’s official!  My chapbook of video game poetry, forthcoming from Manawaker Studio, will be called Extra Lives in Verse.  My publisher just sent me the proof of the interior yesterday, with the poems nicely formatted along with some extra visual touches he added here and there as a lovely surprise.  If I do say so myself, it looks gorgeous!  It doesn’t have a cover yet. That’s the next step. 

Once in a while I’ll have a writing project where I get a little emotional seeing it in the publisher’s format for the first time.  Especially when it comes to stories or poetry I’ve worked on for years and years (have I mentioned I’m a slow writer?).  This is one of those projects.  It’s a simple thing, seeing it in a new font, in a pdf, labeled as a proof, but after having written and read and re-read the words in my working document for so long, it makes it feel almost brand-new, and it’s so validating.  Then later, seeing my work released out into the wild, available to readers?  That’s just the best. 

If you’re in the Portland area on Tuesday, Oct. 6^th, I’ll be joining Brian U. Garrison and Haley Bossé for a reading hosted by Parallel Worlds Bookshop.  The event, Speculative Poetry: Weavings and Unweavings, begins at 6:30pm and is free to attend.  I’ll read an excerpt from The Inca Weaver’s Tales as well as from a forthcoming book of mine—or two…

I hope you can come, enjoy some cool poetry, and support the bookshop! 

From the event page: 

“Join us for an evening of speculative poetry featuring three local poets whose work explores imagined futures, fantastical worlds, identity, ecology, resistance, and everything that poetry can make strange and luminous.

Brian U. Garrison, Katherine Quevedo, and Haley Bossé will each take the floor for a featured reading, with their books available for purchase throughout the evening.

Come discover poetry from the speculative edges.”

My fantasy story “Shades of Bruises and Blood” is available now to subscribers of Trollbreath Magazine in Issue 9; it’ll be available to all on the Trollbreath website later on, but if you don’t want to wait, please consider subscribing. 

Yesterday I attended a panel at Worldcon about tropes.  They talked about how, if you’re going to draw upon tropes (including to subvert them), it helps if you actually have affection for that trope. 

“Shades of Bruises and Blood” is my love letter to my favorite trope of all time: the Enemy Mine.  Named after the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella by Barry B. Longyear, this trope has stirred something deep within me since childhood.  I always loved the episodes of cartoon shows where the good guys and bad guys had to team up for whatever reason.  What kind of alliance would they forge?  How would the dynamics play out?  What about the status quo they’d so surprisingly disrupted?  I didn’t have the vocabulary to express my curiosity like this back in those days, but I felt it.  As Aristotle once wrote, “A common danger unites even the bitterest of enemies.” 

I went on to read Enemy Mine and watch the film adaptation, both of which made me weep.  Then came the novel The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff and the film adaptation The Eagle.  Yes, I even watched the movie Hell in the Pacific, which purportedly helped inspire Longyear’s novella. 

All that to say, I took my job very seriously when I finally felt ready to tackle this trope.  I’ve sort of flirted with it in my other work, but this was the first time I made it so overt.  I tried to pour a lot of myself into these characters and their predicament, even though they’re quite different from me at a surface glance.  We all carry depths.  We all carry the tools to connect, if we choose to wield them.