by Brit Mandelo
Thanks finally to my partner, supportive of the piles of books and late nights spent working, and to my friends, whose enthusiasm for the project bolstered me when I needed it.
About the Editor
Brit Mandelo (britmandelo.com) is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. Her work—fiction, nonfiction, poetry; she wears a lot of hats—has been featured in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Ideomancer. She also writes regularly for Tor.com and has several long-running column series there, including Queering SFF, a mix of criticism, editorials, and reviews on LGBTQI speculative fiction. When not writing, she is a perpetual student and is working up to an eventual (hopefully) PhD. She is a Louisville native and lives there with her partner in an apartment that doesn’t have room for all the books.
Contributors
Keyan Bowes is frequently ambushed by stories, and took the 2007 Clarion workshop for science fiction and fantasy writers in self defense. Since graduating from Clarion, she’s had some twenty short stories and poems published online and in print. Keyan is a member of the Written in Blood writers’ group; of Codex, an online group of neo-professional authors; of ‘Second Draft’, a dedicated group of writers; and a former member of the online critiquing group Critters. She is currently working on two young adult novels, both urban fantasy adventures.
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Kelley Eskridge writes fiction, essays and screenplays. Her novel Solitaire is a New York Times Notable book and was a finalist for the Nebula, Spectrum and Endeavour awards. The stories in her collection Dangerous Space include two Nebula finalists, three Tiptree Prize Honor stories, and a winner of the Astraea Prize. Her story “Alien Jane” was adapted for television, and a film based on Solitaire is currently in development with Eskridge attached as screenwriter. She is an independent editor at Sterling Editing and the Board Chair of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She lives in Seattle with her partner, novelist Nicola Griffith. Visit her at http://kelleyeskridge.com.
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Tobi Hill-Meyer (HandbasketProductions.com) is a trans activist, writer, and filmmaker. She started producing media to fill the utter void of diverse trans characters as well as to offer an alternative to the overwhelmingly exploitative and exotic ways that trans women’s sexuality is often portrayed.
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Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican Canadian, is the author of novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon’s Arms (2007), and short fiction collection Skin Folk (2001). She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and has twice received the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her work has twice been on the bibliography Books for the Teen-Age, issued by the young adult librarians of the New York Public Library. Her science fiction novel Midnight Robber received Honourable Mention for a novel written in creole in Cuba’s “Casa de las Americas” prize for literature. She was a founding member of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in science fiction and fantasy. She is currently Associate Professor specializing in speculative literatures in the Creative Writing Department of the University of California Riverside. The Chaos, her first YA novel, appears in April 2012 from Margaret K. McElderry Books. Her next novel, Sister Mine, is scheduled to appear in spring 2013 from Grand Central Books. Hopkinson splits her time between California and Toronto, Canada.
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Claire Humphrey lives in Toronto, writes novels and stories, and works in the book business. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine and Podcastle. She is also the reviews editor at Ideomancer. You can read more about her at www.clairehumphrey.ca.
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Sarah Kanning (www.sarahkanning.com) has rarely met a near-future dystopian story she didn’t like, and is fascinated by the ways technology can alter and distort our senses of self, identity and memory. Her work has recently appeared in The Crimson Pact volumes 1 & 2 (TheCrimsonPact.com). She writes fantasy and science fiction, and lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
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Keffy R. M. Kehrli is a speculative fiction writer currently living in Seattle. Since attending Clarion in 2008, his work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Apex Online, Escape Pod, and Writers of the Future Vol. 27, among others. He has degrees in both physics and linguistics and does science in a basement when he’s not writing.
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Ellen Kushner’s first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, quickly became a cult book that some say initiated the queer end of the “fantasy of manners” spectrum. She returned to the same setting in The Privilege of the Sword and its sequel, The Fall of the Kings (written with her partner, Delia Sherman), as well as a growing number of short stories. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Her most recent work includes the anthology Welcome to Bordertown, co-edited with Holly Black, a “feminist-shtetl-magical-realist” musical audio drama, The Witches of Lublin, and her own recording of the audiobook version of Swordspoint (ACX/Neil Gaiman Presents). Kushner was for many years the host of public radio’s Sound & Spirit. She and her partner, author and educator Delia Sherman, live in New York City, with a lot of books, airplane ticket stubs, and no cats whatsoever. www.EllenKushner.com
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Richard Larson is currently a graduate student at New York University. His short stories have appeared previously in Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Subterranean, and Wilde Stories 2011: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, among others. He also writes about books for Strange Horizons and movies for Slant Magazine. He can be found online at http://www.rlarson.net.
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Terra LeMay was born on top of a volcano (in Hawaii). She tamed a wild mustang before she turned sixteen, and before twenty-five, she traveled through most of the U.S. and to parts of Europe and Mexico. She has also held some unusual jobs, like training llamas and modeling high-heeled shoes (though not at the same time!) She co-owns a tattoo studio north of Atlanta, but currently spends most of her time creating artisan glass beads and writing. She can be found online at: www.terralemay.com
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Liu Wen Zhuang is the pen-name of Asian-American writer Cynthia Liu, who is based in the Bay Area after doing time in upstate New York and the mid-Atlantic East Coast. “Bud,” from the writer’s collection of short fiction, is both of a piece with and unlike anything Liu has written before.
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Sandra McDonald is the author of the award-winning collection Diana Comet and Other Implausible Stories, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice for Young Readers and an American Library Association “Over the Rainbow” book. She is also the author of three science fiction military novels and two young adult teen mysteries. Her short fiction has appeared in more than forty magazines and anthologies, and she currently teaches college in Northeast Florida. Visit her at www.sandramcdonald.com.
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Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of the Creature Court trilogy (HarperVoyager Australia) and short story collection Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press). She lives in Tasmania with her partner and two daughters. She blogs at http://tansyrr.com, tweets as @tansyrr and is one of the voices of the SF feminist podcast Galactic Suburbia. “Prosperine When It Sizzles” was originally published in New Ceres Nights, as part of the New Ceres shared world project.
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Delia Sherman’s most recent short stories have appeared in the young adult anthology Steampunk! and in Ellen Datlow’s Naked City. She’s written three novels for adults, but is now writing novels for younger readers. Her newest novel, The Freedom Maze, is a time-travel historical about ante-bellum Louisiana. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching, editing, knitting, and cooking. When not on the road, she lives in a rambling apartment in New York City with partner Ellen Kushner and far too many pieces of paper.
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sp; Katherine Sparrow currently writes and lives in San Francisco where the city’s strange tech culture, radical activism, and pastel houses seems to be seeping into her fiction. When she’s not writing she does fundraising, burrito eating, and baby-wrangling. She’s had fiction published by Fantasy Magazine, GigaNotoSaurus, Escape Pod, and others. All things Katherine can be found at katherinesparrow.net.
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Sonya Taaffe’s short stories and poems have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and appeared in various anthologies including The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, Last Drink Bird Head, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, and Trochu divné kusy 3. Her work can be found in the collections Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books) and A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press). She is currently on the editorial staff of Strange Horizons. She holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object.
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Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.
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credits
“Sea of Cortez” © 2011 by Sandra McDonald. First appeared in Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, edited by Tristan Taormino.
“Eye of the Storm” © 1998 by Kelley Eskridge. First appeared in Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling.
“Fisherman” © 2001 by Nalo Hopkinson. First appeared in Skin Folk.
“Pirate Solutions” © 2008 by Katherine Sparrow. First appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.
“A Wild and Wicked Youth” © 2009 by Ellen Kushner. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction June/July 2009.
“Prosperine When it Sizzles” © 2009 by Tansy RaynerRoberts. First appeared in New Ceres Nights, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely.
“The Faerie Cony-Catcher” © 1998 by Delia Sherman. First appeared in Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. Reprinted in So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction, edited by Steve Berman.
“Palimpsest” © 2008 by Catherynne M. Valente. First appeared in Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia.
“Another Coming” © 2004 by Sonya Taaffe. First appeared in Not One of Us #32, edited by John Benson.
“The Ghost Party” © 2011 by Richard Larson. First appeared in Subterranean, edited by Gwenda Bond.
“Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot” © 2011 by Claire Humphrey. First appeared in Strange Horizons.
“Bonehouse” © 2011 by Keffy M. Kehrli. First appeared in Writers of the Future, Volume 27.
“Sex with Ghosts” © 2008 by Sarah Kanning. First appeared in Strange Horizons.
“Spoiling Veena” © 2008 by Keyan Bowes. First appeared in Expanded Horizons.
“Self-Reflection” © 2011 Tobi Hill-Meyer. First appeared in Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, edited by Tristan Taormino.
“The Metamorphosis Bud” © 1996 by Liu Wen Zhuang. First appeared in Genderflex, edited by Cecilia Tan.
“Schrodinger’s Pussy” © 2010 by Terra LeMay. First appeared in Apex Magazine.
