The Currency of His Light

Roy Beckemeyer of Wichita has BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from St. Louis University, Wichita State University, and the University of Kansas, respectively. He retired from a 30-year career at Boeing in research and development, airplane design, and executive management. He has read and written poetry since high school; his post-retirement poetry has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. He has four previous poetry collections in print: his most recent is Mouth Brimming Over (2019, Blue Cedar Press); Stage Whispers (2018, Meadowlark Books) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award; Amanuensis Angel (2018, Spartan Press) assembled ekphrastic poems inspired by depictions of angels in works of modern art; Music I Once Could Dance To (2014, Coal City Press) was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He is co-editor of several poetry anthologies, including Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (2017, Little Balkans Press, with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg). He won the 2016 Kansas Voices award, and his poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards; his prose poem, "Words for Snow," was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019. He and his wife, Pat, celebrated their 60th-anniversary in 2021. In his spare time, he has edited two scientific journals and conducted and published research on the Paleozoic insect fossils of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Visit his author's page at: https://royjbeckemeyer.com/.