Welcome to Bordertown
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Born in 1984, AMAL EL-MOHTAR is a first-generation Lebanese Canadian, currently pursuing a PhD that focuses on representations of fairies in Romantic literature. She is the recipient of the 2009 Rhysling Award for best short poem, and her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Shimmer, and Cabinet des Fées. The Honey Month, a collection of spontaneous poetry and prose inspired by twenty-eight different kinds of honey, is available from Papaveria Press. She also coedits Goblin Fruit, an online quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry, with Jessica P. Wick.
Amal found her entrance to Bordertown in an independent Ottawa bookstore called Perfect Books, where Patricia Caven pressed names into her palms like keys. Windling, de Lint, Bull, and Snyder unlocked doors to the music-ridden alleys she roams to this day. Having read her way in, she is deeply honored to have been asked to write her way out—but has no intention of leaving.
NEIL GAIMAN is the author of the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett); the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the short-story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. He is also the author of books for readers of all ages, including the Newbery Medal–winning novel The Graveyard Book, Coraline, Odd and the Frost Giants, the short-story collection M Is for Magic, and picture books including The Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by Dave McKean; The Dangerous Alphabet, illustrated by Gris Grimly; and Blueberry Girl and Instructions, both illustrated by Charles Vess. Originally from England, he now lives in America. Visit him online at neilgaiman.com.
NALO HOPKINSON was born in Jamaica and has lived in Canada since 1977. She is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award and a two-time recipient of the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. She’s currently working on T’aint, a young adult fantasy novel, for Margaret K. McElderry Books. Nalo remembers working at Toronto science fiction bookstore Bakka Books when The Essential Bordertown arrived, and the joy on the faces of the readers who showed up at the bookstore expressly to buy a copy. One of her earliest ambitions as a writer was to write a Bordertown story. Ambition achieved!
ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON is the author of Moonshine, a vampire novel set in the Lower East Side of 1920s New York City. She has also written Racing the Dark and The Burning City, the first two books of a young adult fantasy trilogy called The Spirit Binders. She came to Bordertown through the books of Emma Bull, Steven Brust, Charles de Lint, and others, which eventually led her to discover the magical world they had all shared. She grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and dreamed of life in a real city until she finally escaped to New York. She can be contacted via her website, alayadawnjohnson.com.
Once upon a time, ANNETTE CURTIS KLAUSE was a teenage runaway. She followed the music north to another country with her friends in a painted van, and had many adventures—some of them good, and some of them not so good. She came home safe and sound, and since those days has done much of her adventuring through the people in her imagination instead. You may have read those exploits in her novels The Silver Kiss, Blood and Chocolate, and Freaks: Alive on the Inside! She has never met a vampire, but they occasionally sneak into her stories anyway. Before she was ever published she was a big fan of the Bordertown stories and was a total squealing fangirl mess when her story was accepted for this anthology. Annette lives in Maryland with her husband and six cats, and works as a children’s librarian.
ELLEN KUSHNER lives in Manhattan and travels a lot. Her most recent novel, The Privilege of the Sword, was nominated for a wildly diverse array of awards, including a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award (for work that best expands or explores our understanding of gender). Back when she finished writing her first novel, Swordspoint, her part-time roommate, rising young editor Terri Windling, asked Ellen if she’d be interested in writing something for this new anthology she was creating, about a town full of elves, music, and motorcycles. Ellen went on to have stories in all of the original four Bordertown anthologies, and is thrilled to have been able to coedit a fifth one now—especially as it meant she and Terri were able to write another Bordertown story together. (Their first one was “Mockery,” with Terri using the pen name Bellamy Bach.) More fact and fiction at ellenkushner.com.
PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP was born in Salem, Oregon, received an MA in English literature from San Jose State University in California, and has been a writer since then. Known primarily for her fantasy fiction, she has published novels for both adults and young adults, winning several World Fantasy Awards and Mythopoeic Awards. Among her YA novels are The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddle-Master trilogy. Her fantasy novels for adults include Ombria in Shadow, Winter Rose, and The Bell at Sealey Head. She has also written a number of short stories, both for adults and young adults, including a tale for The Essential Bordertown. Many of her stories have been gathered into a collection, Harrowing the Dragon. Her latest novel is The Bards of Bone Plain. She has written very little poetry in her life, but figured “what the hey.” She was quite pleased to be invited back to Bordertown. She and her husband, poet David Lunde, live in Oregon.
DYLAN MECONIS is an artist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. She is the creator of the graphic novels Bite Me!, Family Man, and the forthcoming Perseus & Andromeda, along with many other eccentric projects both prose and pictorial. She previously collaborated with Sara Ryan on the short-story comic “Click.” Find out about her more than quarter-century reign of terror at dylanmeconis.com.
TIM PRATT’S stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and his work has won a Hugo Award (and lost Nebula, World Fantasy, Stoker, and Mythopoeic Awards). He is the author of two story collections and half a dozen novels, and works as a senior editor at Locus. He grew up in the rural South and now lives in the urban West with his wife, Heather Shaw, and their son. He read the first Bordertown stories in his local library as a teenager and looks forward to passing those books (and this one) on to his own child. His website is timpratt.org.
SARA RYAN is the author of Empress of the World, an Oregon Book Award winner and an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, and The Rules for Hearts, an Oregon Book Award winner and a Junior Library Guild selection. Her comics work ranges from Hellboy to Image’s Comic Book Tattoo and the Eisner Award–nominated “Me and Edith Head.” Her first graphic novel, Bad Houses, with art by Carla Speed McNeil, is forthcoming from the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics. She was an unaccountably late arrival to Bordertown; she blames too much time in the Dreaming and also with some Dykes to Watch Out For, when she might otherwise have been discovering it. But she’s thrilled to have finally found the Way.
DELIA SHERMAN loves borders and in-between cultures. She comes by this honestly, having been born in Tokyo, and raised between New York City; Sulphur, Louisiana; and Brownwood, Texas, where her mother’s family came from. Her short stories and poems have appeared in such anthologies as Teeth, The Beastly Bride, and fourteen volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She’s also the author of the New York Between fantasies Changeling and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen. She has coedited several anthologies, including The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling. Delia is delighted to return to Bordertown, especially with a poem, the most magical of literary forms.
WILL SHETTERLY has written two novels about Wolfboy’s early days in Bordertown, Elsewhere and Nevernever. He’s also the author of Dogland, a semiautobiographical fantasy, and a few other books and stories. He lives in Tucson with his adored wife, Emma Bull, and two tyrannical cats, Toby and Barncat.
JANNI LEE SIMNER is the author of the postapocalyptic young adult fantasy Bones of Faerie and its sequel, Faerie Winter, as well as Thief Eyes, based on an Icelandic saga. She has also published four books for younger readers and more than thirty short stories. Janni lives less than a hundred miles from the U.S./Mexico border, but in spite of decades spent looking for lam
pposts on foggy nights and turning left in Albuquerque, the World/Realm border continues to elude her. Visit her website at simner.com.
Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, Deathless, the Orphan’s Tales series, and the crowd-funded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009, and the Lambda, Andre Norton, Locus, and Hugo awards in 2010. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.
TERRI WINDLING has been a guiding force in the development of fantasy literature for three decades, winning nine World Fantasy Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, and the 2010 Solstice Award for this work. She has been a fantasy editor at Ace and Tor Books, has published over thirty anthologies for young adult and adult readers, and is the founder of The Endicott Studio, an organization devoted to mythic arts. In 1986 she created the first Bordertown shared-world anthology, and went on to edit three more Bordertown anthologies (Borderland, Life on the Border, and The Essential Bordertown), as well as to oversee Bordertown novels by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull. Terri is delighted to be back on the Border with this volume! She has written several works of mythic fiction (including The Wood Wife, winner of the Mythopoeic Award, and the Old Oak Wood series for children, with pictures by Wendy Froud), and many essays on myth and folklore. She is also an artist whose paintings and collages have been exhibited across the U.S. and Europe (and can sometimes be found on etsy.com). A former New Yorker, she now lives with her husband and stepdaughter in a small village on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, England. For more information, please visit terriwindling.com and endicott-studio.com.
JANE YOLEN, often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America, is the author of over three hundred books, including Owl Moon and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Her books and stories have won an assortment of awards—two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, a nomination for the National Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award, among others. She is also the winner (for body of work) of the Kerlan Award, the World Fantasy Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates. She was the editor of Will Shetterly’s two young adult Bordertown novels, Elsewhere and Nevernever, which originally appeared in her Jane Yolen Books imprint for Harcourt Brace. If you need to know more about her, visit her website at janeyolen.com.