The Dwarf Stars Award 2022 Winners Have Been Announced!

Every year, for over two decades, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has voted on their thoughts of the best speculative poetry that has been released in the previous year. In 2022, 106 members of the organization read and voted from over 1,300 entrees for the winners to be decided. Not only was I thrilled that we’ve featured a few of these poets in the past, but I now have the names of quite a few whose work I will be wanting to check out in the future!

Co-Chairs Adele Gardner & Greer Woodward sent in the details on who won, and I’m thrilled to share the results with all of you! For long-term fans of the site who have been with us since we transitioned to covering all forms of speculative fiction, there is an extra treat on the winner’s list. Roughly a quarter of the included poems focused on horror themes!

You can find the full details of the awards and collected work below.

Each year since 2006, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has honored the best short-form speculative poetry with the Dwarf Stars Award. This award considers all genres of speculative poetry, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, the mythic & legendary, and “unclassifiable but speculative.” Poems must be 1-10 lines (or no more than 100 words for prose poems) and published in the previous year.

 

For 2022, Adele Gardner and Greer Woodward chaired the award, selecting 120 eligible poems (considering 1,371 eligible works published in 2021) for the Dwarf Stars 2022 anthology: https://sfpoetry.com/ds/22dwarfstars.html

From this anthology, SFPA members voted to determine the winners.

 

It is with great pleasure and pride that SFPA announces the winners of the 2022 Dwarf Stars Award:

 

Winner (Tie)

“Poem with Lines from My Son” by Jen Stewart Fueston

“What Trees Read” by Mary Soon Lee

 

Second Place

“Colony” by Jamal Hodge

 

Third Place

“Future Portrait of Dark Matter” by Gene Twaronite

 

Honorable Mentions

“Mexico City, 2101 AD” by Juan Manuel Pérez

“fury” (originally included in Tortured Willows) by Lee Murray

“Mother” by Merie Kirby

“Past Equinox” by Ann K. Schwader

And a tie between

“—And They All Lived Together—” by Andrew J. Wilson

“[cricket song]” by Joshua Gage

 

Congratulations to all the winners, honorable mentions, and the contributors to this year’s anthology! We honor and celebrate all of these wonderful poets, and hope that speculative poetry lovers everywhere will delight in these poems, and the entire anthology.

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