Robert Frazier

Robert Frazier is an American writer of speculative poetry and fiction.

He was born in Ayer, Massachusetts in 1951. His mother, Barbara Brown Frazier, was an oil painter, educated by Emil Albert Gruppe (1896-1978) in Gloucester and Dimitri Romanovsky (1886-1971) in New York for portraiture. His father, Stuart Wilson Frazier, was a civilian teacher of cryptoanalysis -- code breaking -- for US Army security at Fort Devens in Ayer, a post he obtained after serving in the Army with a small contingent of Americans during WWII at Bletchley, the famous secretive codebreaking center for the British, north of London.

Robert Frazier was educated at the University of Iowa, where as an undergraduate, somehow, after being misplaced in a first course, he was lucky to take graduate courses in poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

In the mid-1970s, he moved to Nantucket Island (his distant relatives were among the first settlers there), where an arts colony existed. He married Karol Marie Lindquist, a nationally recognized maker of the Nantucket Lightship Basket, in 1978, and attended the Clarion SF Writers Workshop in Ann Arbor, MI in 1980 (and returned there as the assistant in 1981).

He also began a career in oil painting then, which after a haitus to try working as a fiction writer from 1988 to 1998 (he sold 60 or so stories and was a regular attendee to the Sycamore Hill Workshop), he resumed in 1998.

Robert Frazier freelances as a graphic designer as well, for a time designing books for SF publisher Mark V. Ziesing, and was art director for Nantucket Magazine from 1995 - 2005.

He was president of the Artists' Association of Nantucket from 1999-2004, and now works as their gallery director.

Robert Frazier's  first SF story, “Across Those Endless Skies”, appeared in In the Field of Fire (anth 1987) ed Jack Dann and Jeanne Dann.

He has won the Rhysling Award three times: for Best Long Poem in 1994, and for Best Short Poem in 1980 and 1989.

In 1984, Robert Frazier edited the landmark anthology of SF poetry Burning With A Vision: Poetry of Science and the Fantastic, Owlswick Press. He is a founding member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and a past editor of their newsletter, Star*Line. He also edited and published one of the early magazines of SF poetry, The Speculative Poetry Review (later titled TASP). As a historian, Frazier has written several articles on the evolution of the SF poetry movement...the most recent being a 2005 primer on the Rhysling Awards for the poetry anthology The Alchemy of Stars, the Rhysling Award Winners Showcase.

Perhaps one of his most beautiful SF poems, from among over 400 published, is about a young woman, a star pilot, of the kind that might really exist, in distant future, if we are very lucky and successful. It is "A Starpilot Muses on the Universal Tidal Pool" (from Asimov’s magazine, whole number 107, August 1986, p. 183), it has 17 lines, and it begins:

She’s torched the lightships to every beach,
every hidden cove of relativity,
where spinning arm over arm over arm
galaxies creep along
heavy as starfish on the prowl.

For the year 2006, his 5th consecutive solo exhibition of oil paintings is scheduled at the Old Spouter Gallery, Nantucket Island.

His "Robot Origami" from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March 2005 was nominated for the 2006 Rhysling Award.

His collaborative poem with Bruce Boston, "Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest," received first place in the 2006 Locus Online Poetry Poll for Best All-Time Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror Poem.

In Europe, at at least one university, Frazier is taught to students as the major American SF poet; this is done (academic year 2005-2006) at the Philological-artistic Faculty in the city of Kragujevac, Serbia.

Selected Bibliography

Collections

• Nantucket Slayrides: Three Short Novels (1989) with Lucius Shepard

Anthologies

• The Rhysling Anthology (1983)

Shortfiction

• The Daily Chernobyl (unknown)
• Four Poems (unknown)
• Forbidden Lines (1983)
• Nazca Lines (1987) with Roger Dutcher
• Dreamtigers (1987)
• Across Those Endless Skies (1987)
• Tags (1988)

Essays

• Preface (The Rhysling Anthology) (1983)

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Image borrowed from sfpoetry.com