A Promise Kept in Poetry: The Day He Discovered the Color of Rain by Stephen Scheuerman to Be Published September 3, 2026
Posthumous collection gathers a lifetime of poems exploring nature, memory, language, identity, grief, and the astonishing fact of being alive
August 18, 2026 — Before his death, poet and longtime educator Stephen Scheuerman made a simple request of his sibling: help me publish my poetry.
He had spent years culling and refining the work, preparing a body of poems he was finally ready to share. Scheuerman died unexpectedly in June 2023, before he could see that wish fulfilled.
On September 3, 2026, Authortunities Press will honor it with the publication of The Day He Discovered the Color of Rain, a posthumous collection that preserves the work of a poet who spent a lifetime looking closely at the world and asking what language might reveal about it.
“I had promised him that his poetry would be published,” Mary Stanton, Scheuerman’s sister, writes in the book’s foreword.
That promise becomes more than an act of remembrance. It gives readers entry into an extraordinarily observant mind.
In The Day He Discovered the Color of Rain, weather is never merely weather. Birds are never merely birds. A spider remaking her web, an owl hunting through snow, an ocean repeating a rhythm that is near-music, mourning doves calling from a fire escape, drought settling over Ohio farmland: the natural world becomes a language of its own.
Scheuerman was fascinated by the idea of biophilia, meaning the possibility that human beings carry within themselves an intuitive understanding of the living Earth. His poems repeatedly test the boundary between language and that older knowledge, searching for ways words might imitate the patterns, movements, structures, and mysteries of the world around us.
But this is also the record of a human life.
Scheuerman writes of childhood and family, war and history, sexuality and faith, political violence and private grief. His experience as a gay man living through the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic enters poems of survival, illness, loss, love, and remembrance. “White Night” returns to the 1979 upheaval following the sentencing of Dan White for the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Other poems confront the long aftermath of AIDS and the loss of friends, sometimes with devastating tenderness and sometimes with the dark humor of someone who has spent considerable time contemplating mortality. The result is not a conventional memoir but something more intimate: a life refracted through observation.
His intellectual range was equally expansive. Born in 1949 and raised in a small Ohio farming community, Scheuerman later graduated from Saint Louis University and received conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, completing alternative service at a boys’ home in San Francisco. He went on to earn a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he read with poets Derek Walcott and George Starbuck.
He later became a lecturer in Boston University’s Writing Program, teaching literature, language, metaphor, and grammar while also working across disciplines with scholars in physics and biology on subjects including consciousness, ethics, and biomedical technology. That lifelong curiosity is everywhere in his poetry.
Classical mythology converses with neuroscience. Abraham Lincoln shares space with Mandelbrot fractals. Rilke, Theophrastus, birds, aphasia, weather systems, war, memory, and the rhythms of human speech coexist within a collection fascinated by how one thing becomes another once we find the language to see it.
Scheuerman was equally adventurous with poetic form. Across the collection he works with pantoums, villanelles, found language, response poems, formal constraints, visual structures, historical voices, and linguistic experimentation. Yet beneath that formal intelligence remains something remarkably tender: a desire to see the world accurately enough that it might become new again.
The collection takes its title from “Under Rain,” a poem that follows a man attempting to understand rainfall until knowledge gives way to perception and rain, suddenly, has a color.
That moment embodies the collection itself.
The Day He Discovered the Color of Rain asks readers to look again: at weather, at animals, at history, at language, at the people we have loved and lost, and at the ordinary world that becomes extraordinary when we pay sufficient attention.
The poems were recovered from Scheuerman’s computer after his death. Where drafts contained notes or possible revisions, the decision was made to preserve the poems in their last completed form rather than finish the poet’s work for him.
What remains is his.
His curiosity. His humor. His grief. His politics. His eye for the living world. His fascination with the architecture of language.
And, finally, his voice.
The Day He Discovered the Color of Rain will be published by Authortunities Press on September 3, 2026.
About the Book
Title: The Day He Discovered the Color of Rain Author: Stephen Scheuerman Genre: Poetry Publication Date: September 3, 2026 Publisher: Authortunities Press Author Website: stephenscheuerman.com
About Stephen Scheuerman
Stephen Scheuerman was born in 1949 and raised in a small Ohio farming community surrounded by family, Catholicism, politics, nature, and books. After graduating from Saint Louis University, he received conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War and completed alternative service in San Francisco.
He later earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he read with Derek Walcott and George Starbuck, and became a longtime lecturer in the university’s Writing Program. His teaching and research interests crossed literature, linguistics, neuroscience, consciousness, ethics, biology, and biomedical technology.
Scheuerman remained committed to gay rights throughout his life. His experiences in San Francisco, the political struggle surrounding LGBTQ+ rights, and the loss of many friends during the AIDS epidemic deeply informed his life and work.
Following his retirement, he devoted himself more fully to poetry and to the lifelong fascination with language that fueled his writing.
Stephen Scheuerman died in June 2023.
Media & Review Inquiries
For review copies, interviews about the collection and its publication, excerpts, or additional information, contact:
Authortunities Press
angela@authortunitiespress.com
authortunitiespress.com