ARRIVING SEPTEMBER 1, 2026
Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time gives voice to figures drawn from history, literature, legend, and imagination, illuminating the intimate human desires, losses, and acts of defiance that endure across centuries.
In Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time, Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez crosses centuries to explore the human stories that history, literature, art, and legend leave behind.
Speaking through an extraordinary range of voices — some celebrated, some overlooked, some imagined — Fernandez enters moments of love and betrayal, courage and confinement, grief, discovery, memory, and longing. Historical figures stand beside literary characters; familiar stories are reconsidered from unexpected perspectives; and voices often relegated to the margins are allowed to speak for themselves.
Woven throughout the collection are recurring images of stone and stars: the enduring and the ephemeral, the earthbound and the infinite. Together, these poems collapse the distance between past and present, revealing that however much the world changes, the deepest currents of human experience remain remarkably familiar.
Available September 1, 2026, from Old Scratch Press, an imprint of Current Words Publishing.
Praise for STONE & STAR
“How smoothly Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez slips into the circumstances and psyches of other people, both imagined and actual, as she gives studied yet natural voice to each, including those from history, literature, and film. A master of both traditional and open forms, Fernandez writes with clarity and compassion in her own voice, as well. Stone & Star is a stellar collection.”
Andrea Hollander,
Author of And Now, Nowhere But Here
“When you open this book, open it to ‘Maid Marian’s Many Silences,’ where a woman walled inside a convent hears ‘one small voice soar unafraid over the silence.’ That soaring is the whole project of Stone & Star. Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez hands the microphone to women history left speechless: Heloise pacing the Seine, Ada Lovelace unfurling her mind’s vast wings, the last Amazon standing watch over her sisters.
“A poet of formidable range, Fernandez threads ghazal, villanelle, and sonnet through the collection with a music that never strains against its forms, and she inhabits each speaker so fully that the centuries collapse. These monologues refuse to let their speakers stay buried. Fernandez gives voice, and the broken earth itself gives answer.”
Tamarah Rockwood
Bainbridge Island Press
“Truly haunting… an extraordinarily perceptive, evocative collection.”
Diane Donovon
Midwest Book Review
About the Author
Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez was born in Philadelphia to Peruvian and Puerto Rican parents. She grew up in Philadelphia, Spain, and mostly Puerto Rico before relocating to Florida to attend college. During her junior year she established her Florida residency, met her husband, and began working in libraries. She fell in love with all three, and subsequently found no reason to leave any of them.
Spurred on by the luck of winning the Second Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry Award, she began writing for publication rather late in life and embarked on a long-distance tutelage under poet Andrea Hollander for several years.
She holds an M.A. in English literature and is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Shining from a Different Firmament (Finishing Line Press, 2015), which she presented at the Miami International Book Fair; The Ocean Between Us (Backbone Press, 2017); and Simultaneous States (Bainbridge Island Press, 2025). Her work has been featured and read several times on WLRN, South Florida’s NPR station, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015, 2017, 2020, and 2025.
A science fiction reader since she first discovered Andre Norton’s The Zero Stone at age ten, she recently began writing speculative poetry and science fiction stories and joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Two of her short stories have received Honorable Mentions in the Writers of the Future contest.
In 2025, she was accepted as a member of the Old Scratch Press Poetry/Short Form collective, where she serves as a contributing poetry editor of its online literary magazine, Instant Noodles.
She has worked in public and academic libraries since her college days and became a university reference librarian after earning her M.L.S. She lives by a lake in Miami, Florida, with her husband, an astrophysics professor, and a necessary number of cats.
More at beatrizffernandez.com | IG: @nebula4291
