SETI AIR Newsletter - September 2025

AIR Program Spotlight

Cosmic Chronicles Literary Award

The Cosmic Chronicles Literary Award is a new contest for emerging authors from the SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence (AIR) program. In an Open Call we invited writers and poets working in literature, speculative fiction/sci-fi, experimental poetry, and philosophy to submit original, unpublished creative work that reflects on the themes of intelligence and consciousness before the September 1, 2025 deadline. 

We have received a high number of submissions from 33 countries, including Peru, New Zealand, Ghana, India, Japan, all over Europe, Canada, and the USA. Entries included visual poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and vignettes. The submissions are now being reviewed by Gregory Betts, Advisor of the Cosmic Consciousness Literature and Poetry residency, Bettina Forget, Director of the SETI AIR program, and three invited jurors who are outstanding talents in the fields of science fiction and contemporary poetry.

Amy Catanzano
Recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and the Noemi Press Book Award in Fiction, Amy Catanzano publishes poetry and fiction, poetic theory, and multimodal literary art, including web-expanded literature. Writing in parallel to cutting-edge physics as well as the literary and artistic subcultures of the avant-garde, she forges innovative connections between literature, science, and the arts. 
www.amycatanzano.com/

Eric Choi
Eric Choi is a Hong Kong born aerospace engineer, writer, and editor, currently based in Toronto, Canada. He is the recipient of two Aurora Awards and an Asimov Award (now Dell Award) for his hard SF short stories and anthologies. Over the course of his aerospace engineering career, he has worked on a number of space projects including the Meteorological (MET) payload on the Phoenix Mars Lander and the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station.
www.aerospacewriter.ca/

Peter Watts
https://rifters.com/

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