The Ghazal Page is back! (and contains three of my ghazals!)

I'm very thrilled to be part of the comeback of The Ghazal Page! This inaugural issue of the revived Ghazal Page is chock-full of an amazing variety of this fascinating and fun poetry form, collected by the new editor, Holly Jensen, who kindly included my poems "Hypatia's Revenge", "The Ghazal Ghazal (or How to Write a Ghazal), (which she uses as an example below) and "Ghazal Upon Hearing of a Mutual Friend's Death" in this new issue!

When Women Waken Wildlife issue goes live!

I have two poems in the new Wildlife issue of When Women Waken: a journal of Poetry, Prose and Images

Renascence and Caernarfon Retreat

When Women Waken is a wonderful journal with gorgeous artwork and writing by women all over the world who support each other's creative endeavors.

The Quarterday Review to publish my latest ghazal and review my chapbook!

I'm happy to have a new ghazal, "Thirteen Days and Nights" upcoming in the new journal The Quarterday Review: Poetry of Mythic Journeys. This is an ekphrastic ghazal inspired by the painting “The Amazon Queen Thalestris in the Camp of Alexander the Great” by Johann Georg Platzer, with thanks to Adrienne Mayor’s article on the subject in History Today 1/15. Her article and Platzer's painting really brought the encounter to life for me.

Quarterday's editor also kindly agreed to review my chapbook, Shining from a Different Firmament!

My latest poem in Minerva Rising's upcoming Open issue.

Minerva Rising Literary Journal will publish my poem "Emily Brontë Addresses Her Creation" in their upcoming Open themed issue. This is a persona poem from the pov of Emily addressing her most famous and infamous creation. I'm so happy this poem found a home promptly because it's my current favorite!

I have yet to see the perfect Heathcliff personified on-screen--I'm still waiting!

Librarything giveaway concurrent with Goodreads....

In celebration of my birth month, I'm giving away signed copies of my poetry chapbook, Shining from a Different Firmament via Librarything as well! So far 4 people have requested copies via LT and 68 and counting via Goodreads! These are early days, as the giveaways run for a month. For those of you not familiar with Librarything, it's a great way to catalog and organize your own books, discover new books and share your libraries and book reviews with your friends. There are groups for every type of reader imaginable. You can sign up for giveaways (a review is usually requested by the author or publisher giving away the book) or post your own! Ebooks as well!

Goodreads Giveaway begins May 18th!

I'm giving away five copies of my chapbook, Shining from a Different Firmament, via Goodreads.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Shining from a Different Firmament

by Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez

Giveaway ends June 18, 2015.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to Win

Authors for Nepal

I am participating in the Authors for Nepal  initiative to raise funds for the Nepal earthquake.  I found out about it on facebook.  Authors donate services or signed books or even a character name as incentive to donors.  The books or services are being auctioned off on ebay and the author will then deliver the item or service directly to the donor.  I am donating signed copies of my chapbook, here: Shining from a Different Firmament--hopefully there will be some poetry lovers out there; I noticed most books were YA.

Feature on Somos en escrito: the Latino Literary Online Magazine!

Muchas gracias to Armando Rendón for featuring my work on the latest issue of Somos en escrito!  It includes three of the poems from my new chapbook, Shining from a Different Firmament:  Nefertiti's Secret, The Picture of Constance Wilde and Red Light.

The new Ghazal Page will publish four of my ghazals!

Holly Jensen has re-launched The Ghazal Page and accepted FOUR of my ghazals; three for the summer issue and one for winter.  I am very happy to be included in this journal that originally debuted in 1999 under the editorship of Gene Doty and features poets from all over the world.  The ghazal has become my signature form poem--definitely my favorite and most comfortable poetry form! 

Holly is still reading for the Summer issue until May 15th and also invites poets "to send us ghazals inspired by our Challenge topic: FLORA." by August 15th.

30 Days of Poetry Love Q&A with Lidy Wilks

Lidy Wilks, fellow Scribber, who blogs at http://iheartallstories.weebly.com/ had the brilliant and fun idea to interview a different poet every day of the month for National Poetry Month.  She was kind enough to make me her April 14th interviewee and publish a poem from my chapbook:  Red Light.

Check out her website every day this month!

Just squeaked one in for March! "Ode to your Code" to the rescue!

O'Miami and WLRN of South Florida are starting off their National Poetry Month celebrations with a fun tumblr poetry challenge:  write an ode to your zip code consisting of as many words in each line as indicated by your zip code:  mine is 33185.  I wrote this:

http://zipodes.tumblr.com/post/114664222011/33185

published on their Ode to Your Zip Code tumblr on March 26th:

Ode to Your Zip Code archive

Miami Herald reporter Kathleene Devaney also interviewed me and discussed my poem in an article just published on the 29th:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article16841207.html

And so it begins!

Another nice surprise today, I finally received my poetry chapbook from the publishers--
 

https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=2243


Blurbs for my book, kindly provided by Andrea Hollander and Julie Marie Wade, FIU Creative Writing professor:


The poems in Beatriz Fernandez's Shining from a Different Firmament do just that. They shine light on women history has slighted, mistreated, or forgotten altogether. They give us "Hypatia's Revenge," "Nefertiti's Secret," and "The Picture of Constance Wilde." They also consider Dante's passion for Beatrice and examine Richard the Lionheart's mummified heart. This collection is pithy and surprising, rich with persona poems rendered as ghazals, epistles, and ekphrastic musings. Julianna Baggott's Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices has found a worthy companion in Beatriz Fernandez's stirring debut. Like the women she embodies, Fernandez writes with the vision of one who "chart[s] the oceans of the night."
--Julie Marie Wade, author of Without, Postage Due, and When I Was Straight. www.juliemariewade.com

Amid this era of poetry that runs the gamut from solipsism to impenetrability, how refreshing to find a poet of intelligence who writes with clarity about those whose lives, whether actual or fictional, deserve more notice. Reminiscent of Robert Browning in his ability to vividly inhabit voices other than his own, Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez is a welcome master of both open and closed forms, as she brings together history, compassion, and music to each poem in this fine first collection.
—Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012

2015 Off to a Good Start!

Words Dance Publishing will feature two of my poems on their site in the next two months:  "Late Night Shift" (inspired by a late night visit to a Waffle House many years ago) will appear Jan 29th and "Heartless" (based on a memory of Raggedy Ann dolls and books) on Feb 24th.  This means I can coast until March, right?

Writing year in review: 2014--not bad!

8 acceptances (individual poems)

1 individual poem awarded, 3^rd place.

2 chosen as readers’ favorites (#1 and #3)

1 chapbook runner-up award

1 chapbook accepted (20 poems)

1 Pushcart Prize nomination
1 interview to be published (for Arte Latino Now, at Queens College at Charlotte)

I am most pleased with the Readers' choice and Pushcart nomination!  

Fall was slow, but things picked up in the Winter:

"Nothing in the Dark" a poem inspired by the eponymous classic Twilight Zone episode was published by FLARE: the Flagler Review, Fall edition, page 39.

And "Late Bloomers" was just chosen to be the poem for May in the Writer's Rising Up 2015 calendar.  

The calendar will be available to download for free in January: Digging to the Roots .

Readers' Choice: Letter from Lara and Point of No Return chosen as readers' favorites.

I was very happily surprised to come across this post from Spark: A Creative Anthology--they had a vote on which pieces, either prose or poetry, from each volume over the last two years were the readers' favorite pieces and two of my poems were chosen!  "Letter from Lara" was chosen as the number one favorite from Volume V, which was an excellent volume of stories and poems, so I am extremely flattered!

Spark: Readers' Choice--The First Two Years

Shining from a Different Firmament: my first chapbook of poetry!

My first chapbook will be published just in time for Valentine's Day (and Women's History Month in March)!
It can be pre-ordered at the publisher's site:

https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=

The Table of Contents:

Hypatia’s Revenge

Sister Mary Melanie’s Last Cotillion

Nefertiti’s Secret

The Picture of Constance Wilde

Heloise Alone, Argenteuil, 1118

On Viewing ‘Dante and Beatrice’ by Henry Holiday, 1884

Very Truly Yours, Irene Norton, née Adler

Rachel’s Reasons

Monody for Pierre by Marie C., Paris, 1910

Cassandra Austen Writes to Jane’s Faithless Lover

The Amazon Warrior Champion

Letter from Lara, Yuriatin, 1920

Richard the Lionheart’s Mummified Heart Examined

Red Light

I designed the cover and Jim took the picture of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy and my author pics!

Why Write?

I've been thinking about why I suddenly decided to begin publishing my poetry and trying to improve my writing in order to make it publishable.  I certainly don't intend to supplement my income or launch a career at my age, but I notice the poems I'm writing are like a file card index of my memories. My new poems reflect seemingly random flotsam and jetsam that got caught in my imagination and never left me.  But why we notice one thing and not another--how we filter the stream of our life's events through our psyche--these things make up a person.  My touchstone moments are being manifested and recorded via my poems.

We are happy to inform you.....

I really love emails that begin with those words!

I am happy to inform you, dear Imaginary Readers, that FLARE: the Flagler Review just accepted my poem "Nothing in the Dark" inspired by a classic Twilight Zone episode and more distantly by William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

My first Pushcart Prize Nomination!

I just received a letter from the editor of Falling Star Magazine that the he and his staff had nominated my poem, "Lincoln's Long Trip Home, 1865" for a Pushcart Prize!  As far as winning, this means nothing because tens of thousands of poems are nominated by small literary journals and presses worldwide, but as it is my first, I am still excited and pleased to have written one of the six poems nominated by Falling Star this year.  The editors put a lot of faith behind my poem and I'm happy they liked it enough to nominate it.  As it came on the heels of several rejections (my record of at least one acceptance a month which began last June was broken in July) it was even more appreciated.

Poetry Chapbook Accepted by Finishing Line Press

My poetry chapbook entitled "Shining from a Different Firmament" was accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press.  (I had entered their yearly New Women's Voices chapbook contest and although I didn't win, they still offered me general publication.)

The chapbook consists of 20 mostly persona poems about historical and legendary women, among them:

Hypatia of Alexandria
Irene Adler, Sherlock Holmes' nemesis
Doc Holliday's cousin Sister Mary Melanie, the model for Gone With the Wind's Melanie Hamilton later Wilkes.
Madame Curie
Beatrice, whom Dante loved and featured in his Inferno.
Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar
Queen Nefertiti
Heloise
Rachel of the Bible
Cassandra Austen, sister of Jane
Lara, a character in Boris Pasternak's sole novel:  Doctor Zhivago

Those who can't write....submit!

The past few months have not been very productive for me, poetry writing-wise, so I'm taking advantage and concentrating on submitting my backlist of poems.  Some of my best haven't been published because they need particular markets which I haven't found yet (or haven't been invented yet!)  Well, that's my take on it,anyway!

It's one way to stay productive in those sparse writing months--no one can publish it while it's sitting in your computer!  And waiting for acceptances is excruciating, so you want to have a constant rolling submission rate to ensure the flow of acceptances is a stream (or at least a trickle!) and keeps you encouraged.

Somewhere I read that if you are a writer who needs encouragement to write, then you can forget about being a writer!  But that's a little harsh, don't you think?  Everyone needs encouragement; sure, there are writers like Emily Dickinson who write in isolation but even she sought out encouragement--that she didn't receive as much as she deserved is another thing.  Genius is often not rewarded in its own age, but most of us aren't geniuses, so we can expect some encouragement, I hope!

I've been receiving acceptances on a regular basis, at least one a month for a year now, and I am waiting to hear from five or six journals/contests right now.  In late May I heard from Spellbound that they accepted The Coqui Prince, my Puerto Rican Frog Prince fairy tale adaptation poem (Whew! That's a mouthful!) for publication in their special anthology edition.  I'm very happy to be included in that!  This poem flowed out very naturally and is based on memories of my father's country house in the hills of Puerto Rico.

I have now passed the criteria (which does not include publications in children's poetry magazines, by the way, which I think is a shame, since writing for children is much more difficult than for adults!  But they were very prompt in adding some journals that were not listed in their publications list, so I can't complain!) to be listed on the Poets & Writers directory, click on my name to see my listing:

Beatriz Fernandez