Speculative Love Poems for Valentine's Day

Speculative Love Poems for Valentine's Day

Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading for Valentine’s Day

Sunday February 9, 2025, live on Facebook via Zoom, 7 to 8 pm ET

Four speculative poets will read their love-themed, speculative poetry to celebrate Valentine's Day 2025.

DA Xioalin Spires

Herb Kauderer

Miguel Mitchell

Akua Lezli Hope

DA Xioalin Spires

D.A. Xiaolin Spires Website D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as NY, Hawaiʻi, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Make Shift, Deep Signal, and Sharp and Sugar Tooth. Her works have been selected for The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time Stories, with poetry nominated for Rhysling, Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.

She has a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology and has conducted National Science Foundation-funded research. Her multifaceted writing reflects her interest in food systems, ecology, technology and society. She has mentored through SFWA and has taught academic and creative writing to students at the college level. She speaks multiple languages, savors durians, dekopon and rose-apples and teaches stick-fighting and weapons-based martial arts. Brush in hand, she also paints fantastical art in sumi ink, gouache, watercolor and acrylic. When she’s not doing all these things, she is playing with meeples, cards and tiles, convening with good folk around a board game or RPG.

Herb Kauderer

Herb Kauderer is a retired factory worker/truck driver who grew up to become a tenured associate professor of English at Hilbert College. His doctoral dissertation and both his master’s theses were related to speculative writing. He is a fifth generation Buffalonian who currently lives near the north-east corner of Lake Erie and often walks the waterfront. A favorite hobby is getting physicist’s drunk so he can understand them.

Herb has written film, drama, non-fiction, and short fiction, but is most noted for his poetry. He has had over 2,500 poems accepted, many of them gathered into twenty-three books and chapbooks with more on the way. His writing has won the Critters Readers’ Award (2021), the Asimov’s Readers’ Award (2017), the Ewaipanoma Sonnet Contest (2008), the WorldCon Poetry Slam (1998). and the Sycamore Award (1992), and has received third place for the Elgin Award (2020) and Dwarf Stars Award (2021). Over the last thirty-three years, thirty-three of his poems have been nominated for the Rhysling Award. He has received many other kind accolades, including honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (1996).

Herb has four children including writer/novelist Shannon Yseult. The main theme of his writing is “society lies” and he believes it may lie about love more than anything else.

Miguel Mitchell

Miguel O. Mitchell, PhD (he/him) is a Black speculative poet, SFF author, and retired chemist. His poems have appeared in Amazing Stories, Dreams & Nightmares, Eye to the Telescope, Scifaikuest, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, Star*Line, and Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2022). His poem "Wine Tasting on the Planet Ufahamu" received Honorable Mention in the 2024 SFPA Poetry Contest. He has been co-editor of the 2023 Dwarf Stars Anthology for the best 1-10 line published poems and will be also its editor in 2025. He is part of the Sauúti Collective, writing poems for a shared universe based on African languages and cultural elements. He runs a monthly online Speculative Poetry Workshop sponsored by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and has also run this as a training workshop in-person and online at the science fiction and fantasy conventions Capclave and Balticon.

Akua Lezli Hope

Akua Lezli Hope, a Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry, is a paraplegic creator & wisdom seeker who creates poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments & peace. In print since 1974 with over 500 poems published, her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest Book Award) & Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (Elgin Award). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include NEA & NYFA fellowships, SFPA contest award, a Rhysling award, a NYSCA grant for Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry & a 2024 NYSCA grant for disability poetics. She created the Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading series, edited the record-breaking sea issue of ETTT & edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the first of its kind.

The Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series, launched on September 13, 2020, features speculative poets presenting their world-reshaping work.

Now completing its fifth year, The Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series has presented 40 hour-long events including 50 poet readings. Readings are broadcast live on Facebook via Zoom and all are recorded.

The Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series was created by poet, writer and artist, Akua Lezli Hope, inspired by the energy and community of ConZealand. “Hearing and seeing creators from all over the world was transformative. I hope this series will inspire people to listen to these word wielders and, after listening, to seek their wondrous works. The possibility for bedazzlement and a deep and lasting engagement is at hand.”

The series was made possible, in part, by the Artist Development grant program administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes and funded by the Community Foundation of Elmira- Corning and the Finger Lakes, Inc. It was later funded, in part, by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature.

For 2025, The Series needs and seeks other funders, as P&W through NYSCA only supports NYS artists and The Series presents poets from across the nation and around the world.

Speculative poetry, ancient of days, older than the flood, the poetry of possibilities, centers the imagined as real. The first recorded human literature was speculative verse: Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf, are ancient exemplars. Speculative poetry includes alternate history, astropoetry, cryptids, cyberfunk, cyberpunk, dystopian, fabulism, fairytales, fantasy, folklore, futurism, horror, magic, monsters, mythology, occult, paranormal, robots, science fiction, shifters, slipstream, solar punk, solar funk, space opera, superheroes, supernatural, sword and sorcery, sword and soul, steam funk, steam punk, time travel, post-apocalyptic, and weird. It takes all poetic forms plus one called scifaiku.

From Nursery Rhymes to Edgar Allen Poe’s the Raven, from Puff the Magic Dragon to Zombie Jamboree, we’ve all recited and sung speculative poetry.

Find The Series’ recordings at: https://www.facebook.com/specpo/videos and/or on Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series’ youtube channel: https://tinyurl.com/specpovids. The list of past poets is at https://www.speculativepoetry.com/speculative-sundays-series.

Host or Publisher Speculative Sundays