Bruce Boston (1943-2024)
Author Bruce Boston, 81, died November 11, 2024. He was best known as a poet, but was also a prolific prose writer. He was the recipient of the first Grand Master award presented by the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) in 1999.
Bruce David Boston was born July 16, 1943 in Chicago IL and grew up in Southern California. He moved to the Bay Area in 1961 and attended UC Berkeley, graduating with a BA in economics in 1965 and a MA in 1967. He remained in the area until 2001, when he relocated to Florida. In addition to writing, he worked as a programmer, professor, technical writer, and in other professions.
Boston began publishing surreal short fiction and works of SF in the early ’70s alongside his poetry. Over the course of his five-decade career, he published over a hundred stories and many hundreds of poems. Some of his earliest work is collected in Jackbird: Tales of Illusion & Identity (1976), and other poems appear in The Nightmare Collector (1989), Faces of the Beast (1990), Cybertexts (1992), Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest (1992, with Robert Frazier), Accursed Wives (1993), Specula: Selected Uncollected Poems (1993), Sensuous Debris: Selected Poems, 1970-1995 (1995), Quanta: Award Winner Poems (2001), and more. He was nominated for 18 Bram Stoker Awards and won four for his poetry collections: Pitchblende (2003), Shades Fantastic (2006), The Nightmare Collection (2008), and Dark Matters (2010). He was a seven-time winner of the Rhysling Award and won a Dwarf Star award for short poem “In Perpetuity” in 2023, all presented by the SFPA.
His prose writing appears in She Comes When You’re Leaving & Other Stories (1982), Skin Trades (1988), Hypertales & Metafictions (1990), Short Circuits (1990), Houses & Other Stories (1991), Night Eyes (1993), Bruce Boston: Short Stories, Volume 1 (2003), and Bruce Boston: Short Stories, Volume 2 (2003). His novels are Stained Glass Rain (1993) and The Guardener’s Tale (2007).
Boston was also a Pushcart Prize winner, a frequent award juror, served as an officer in the SFPA, edited numerous publications, and was poetry guest of honor at the 2013 World Horror Convention.
He is survived by his wife, author Marge Simon, married in 2001.
For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
