Posts tagged ‘Rebecca Jones-Howe’

Broad Knowledge

Recommended by the Barnes & Noble Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog: “The lineup of contributing authors include a wide range of new and established horror and speculative fiction writers, including L. Timmel Duchamp, …Nisi Shawl, [and] D.A. Xiaolin Spires”.

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Ebook (978-1-937794-86-6):


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Released 20 November 2018

About

Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good is a feminist anthology of dark fiction and darker knowledge, edited by Joanne Merriam. Containing 35 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features 35 fearless writers who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity. It’s the second in the Women Up To No Good series, which can be read in any order. It’s forthcoming on 20 November 2018.

Our contributors are based in or hailing from Australia, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, India, the Philippines, and all over the United States. Between them, they have won the Aeronautilus, Encouragement, Fresh Voices, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Aurora, Bram Stoker, and Ignotus, as well as numerous others! We also include two stories in translation, one by Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría and the other by Galician writer and poet Estíbaliz Espinosa.

Table of Contents

  • Charlotte Ashley, “She Falls”
  • R. S. Benedict, “Clara Vox”
  • Megan Chaudhuri, “First mouse model of Innsmouth Fish-man Syndrome draft 2 USE THIS VERSION – edits by MK.doc”
  • Autumn Christian, “Flowers for Dogman”
  • Vida Cruz, “Blushing Blue”
  • Sarina Dorie, “The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire”
  • L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” (first published in Pulphouse 8, August 1990, and also available in The Women Who Walk Through Fire, ed. Susanna J. Sturgis, Crossing Press, 1990 and in PDF on Duchamp’s website)
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “23 commuter line chromosomes” (first published in Galician in Curiosidade, but original in English, translated by the author)
  • A. T. Greenblatt, “Five Meters Ahead, Two Centuries Away”
  • Claudine Griggs, “The Cold Waters of Europa”
  • Audrey R. Hollis, “Your Life Will Look Perfect from Afar”
  • Joanna Michal Hoyt, “Taking It Back”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Election Season”
  • Ezzy G. Languzzi, “Viva La Muñeca”
  • Maggie Maxwell, “Like I Need a Hole in the Head”
  • Rati Mehrotra, “Make Pretty”
  • Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría, “Liquid Glass” (trans. Lawrence Schimel)
  • Premee Mohamed, “Below the Kirk, Below the Hill”
  • Wendy Nikel, “Maidens of the Sea”
  • Julie Nováková, “Frankenstein Sonata”
  • Aimee Ogden, “Matched Set”
  • Therese Pieczynski, “Three Days, Two Nights”
  • Laura E. Price, “Mary in the Looking Glass”
  • Clarice Radrick, “The Red”
  • Nisi Shawl, “Street Worm” (first published in Streets of Shadows, Alliteration Ink, 2014; also appeared in Street Magicks, Prime Books, 2016)
  • Tabitha Sin, “The Donor”
  • Angela Slatter, “The Song of Sighs” (first published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, 2013; also appeared in New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird, 2015)
  • D.A. Xiaolin Spires, “Sunbasker”
  • Priya Sridhar, “Tidal Bloom”
  • Jae Steinbacher, “Blood Sausage”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “Like Milkweed” (first appeared in Not One of Us #52, ed. John Benson, October 2014)
  • Liz Ulin, “Profanity”
  • Marie Vibbert, “Infinite Boyfriends”
  • Mingzhao Xu, “Think, Baby Turtle”
  • Xin Niu Zhang, “The Ladies in the Moon”

Contributors

Charlotte Ashley is a writer, editor and bookseller living in Toronto, Canada. Her fantasy and science fiction short stories have appeared in F&SF, Clockwork Canada, Luna Station Quarterly, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, and elsewhere. Her historical fantasy, “La Héron,” was nominated for both the Aurora and Sunburst Awards in 2016. You can find more about her at www.once-and-future.com or on Twitter @CharlotteAshley.

R. S. Benedict grew up in rural New York but spent three years living in China. Her work has appeared in Unicorn Booty and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

A toxicologist by training and a writer by inclination, Megan Chaudhuri lives outside Seattle with one spouse and two cats. Her fiction has appeared in Analog, Crossed Genres, GigaNotoSaurus, and other venues.

Autumn Christian is a fiction writer who lives in the dark woods with poisonous blue flowers in her backyard and a black deer skull on her wall. She is waiting for the day when she hits her head on the cabinet searching for the popcorn bowl and all consensus reality dissolves. She’s been a freelance writer, a game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. She considers Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep, as main sources of inspiration.

Vida Cruz is a Filipina born, bred, and based in the Philippines. A 2017 Writers of the Future winner and a 2014 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Writers of the Future vol. 34, Expanded Horizons, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, Philippine Speculative Fiction, and the Australian fantasy anthology Phantazein. In her spare time, she draws pretty things, pets all the dogs, and claws at her towering TBR pile. Tweet her at @laviecestmoi. If you’d like to help the rebuilding or rehabilitation efforts for the Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda survivors, this charity is a good place to make inquiries: Save the Children.

 

 

Sarina Dorie has sold about 100 short stories to markets like Daily Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, Cosmos, and Sword and Laser. Her steampunk romance series, The Memory Thief, and her collections, Fairies, Robots and Unicorns—Oh My! and Ghosts, Werewolves and Zombies—Oh My! are available on Amazon, along with other books. You can find more information about her short stories and novels on her website: sarinadorie.com.

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of several books, including The Waterdancer’s World and Never at Home. Her five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle series was awarded a Special Honor by the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award jury. In 2004, she founded Aqueduct Press, which now claims the lion’s share of her time and effort and for which she was a finalist for the 2017 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional. She lives in Seattle. Find her at ltimmelduchamp.com. (You can read her story in PDF at her website.)

Estíbaliz Espinosa: She is the author of seven science poetry books, some short stories about scientific women, and also poetry translation. She was awarded the Afundación – PEN Poetry Prize in 2017. In addition to writing, she works as a musician and science journalist. Hispanic philologist, sociologist, and amateur astronomer. Her work has been translated into English, Welsh, Catalan, Hebrew, Japanese, Macedonian, and Italian. Her last poetry book is Curiosidade (Curiosity), in which “23 commuter line chromosomes” first appeared, in Galician. She is from A Coruña, Spain.

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s well acquainted with all four seasons and is known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine places. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

 

 

Claudine Griggs is the Writing Center Director at Rhode Island College, and her publications include three nonfiction books about transsexuals along with a couple dozen articles on writing, teaching, and other topics. She has also begun writing fiction and plans to draft more science fiction, her first-love genre as a teenager. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Zahir Tales, Leading Edge SF, The Chaffey Review, New Theory, Not a Pipe Publishing, and Baen Books’ Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction (June 2016). Griggs earned her BA and MA in English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Audrey R. Hollis, 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, is a Los Angeles-based writer. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lunch Ticket, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @audreyrhollis or visit her website www.audreyrhollis.com.

Joanna Michal Hoyt lives with her family on a Catholic Worker farm in upstate NY where she spends her days tending goats, gardens and guests and her evenings reading and writing odd stories. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, and Mysterion. She can be found online at joannamichalhoyt.com.

 

 

Rebecca Jones-Howe is the author of the short story collection Vile Men. Her work has been published in [PANK], Punchnel’s, and Pulp Modern, among others. She lives in Kamloops, British Columbia and is currently at work on her first novel. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Ezzy G. Languzzi is a Latinx writer of speculative short fiction.

Maggie Maxwell has been writing stories that make physicists roll in their graves since 1994. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, a collection of the ghosts of plants she’s killed, and a large number of overworked and underpaid bookshelves. Her work has been published on Daily Science Fiction. She can be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille.

 

 

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra makes her home in Toronto, Canada. Her first book, Markswoman, was published in January 2018 and the sequel, Mahimata, will be published in March 2019. Her stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review, IGMS, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and many more. Find her at ratiwrites.com.

Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a university professor. Her novelette, Memory, is also available from Upper Rubber Boot Books (in a translation into English by Lawrence Schimel, who also translated “Liquid Glass”), and was a finalist for the Spanish national science fiction award, the Ignotus. Her other titles include a novella, Antumbra, Umbra y Penumbra (Editorial Cerbero, 2018), a short novel, El tren (Café con Leche, 2016), and a collection of stories, Diez varaiaciones sobre el amor (Editorial Cerbero, 2017).

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction writer based in Canada. Her work has been published by Nightmare Magazine, Martian Migraine Press, Innsmouth Free Press, and many others. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus.

 

 

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and is forthcoming from Analog. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com.

Julie Nováková is a Czech author and translator of SF, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and elsewhere. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius) and over thirty short stories. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, German and Filipino. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, and the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Read more at www.julienovakova.com and follow her on Twitter @Julianne_SF.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, and Escape Pod.

Therese Pieczynski has published in Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, River City, the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated, and in 2012 with Nancy Kress in New Under The Sun as part of the Stellar Guild series brought out by Arc Manor.

Laura E. Price lives in southwestern Florida with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in On Spec, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, Penumbra eMag, Gallery of Curiosities, The Best of Metaphorosis 2017, and Betwixt. She also blogs at seldnei.wordpress.com.

Clarice Radrick’s work can be found in Myriad Lands Volume 1, Havok, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Nightmare Stalkers and Dream Walkers, Spellbound, Haiku of the Dead, Under the Juniper Tree, Inchoate Echoes, and The Brisling Tide. For more information, visit www.clariceradrick.com.

Nisi Shawl is the author of the Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair, co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and co-editor of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Her story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and was nominated for that year’s World Fantasy Award. She is a co-founder and Steering Committee member of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she also serves on the writing workshop Clarion West’s board of directors.

 

 

Tabitha Sin is a speculative fiction and hybrid memoir-fiction writer. Her science fiction works have been published in Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction and Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Her hybrid memoir-fiction pieces can be found in Side B Magazine and Moonroots zine. She is a VONA alum and a mango fiend.

Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil and Corpselight, as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and six Aurealis Awards. Vigil was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2018. Find her at www.angelaslatter.com.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Strange Horizons, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Broad Knowledge, Deep Signal, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, and Battling in All Her Finery. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

A 2016 MBA graduate and published author, Priya Sridhar has been writing fantasy and science fiction for fifteen years. She believes that every story is a journey, and that a good tale allows the reader to escape to a new world. She also enjoys reading, biking, movie-watching, and classical music. Priya lives in Miami, Florida with her family and posts monthly at her blog www.priyajsridhar.com.

 

 

Jae Steinbacher is a speculative fiction writer, editor, and wanderer soon to call Seattle home. Her stories have appeared in The Overcast, Terraform, Escape Pod, PodCastle, and other venues. She was a 2017-18 North Carolina Arts Council fellow and a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds grants. Jae is the Workshop Administrator for the Clarion West Writers Workshop and attended in 2014. You can find her on Twitter at @JaeSteinbacher or visit her website, julie-steinbacher.com.

Sonya Taaffe reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in Forget the Sleepless Shores (Lethe Press) and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, A Mayse-Bikhl, and Ghost Signs. She lives with her husband and two cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper belt object.

Liz Ulin was a winner of the Fresh Voices Screenplay Competition, and a finalist in The Canadian Short Script Competition, The Canadian Authors Association Short Story Competition, and The Writers Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. She has also had several short stories adapted and produced at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre.

 

 

Besides selling thirty-odd short stories, a dozen poems and a few comics, Marie Vibbert has been a medieval (SCA) squire, ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and has played O-line and D-line for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. Her work has been called “…the embodiment of what science fiction should be…” by The Oxford Culture Review.

Mingzhao Xu immigrated to the United States from China as a child. One of her greatest joys in life is using fiction to highlight the humor, challenges and pathos of her childhood. She currently lives in California.

Xin Niu Zhang was born in Shanghai, grew up in Toronto, and is currently studying at the University of Waterloo. Her ultimate aspiration is to write a book glamorizing the lives of accountants.

 

 

Editor Joanne Merriam has most recently edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, The Museum of All Things Awesome And That Go Boom, and, with H. L. Nelson, Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005), and in dozens of magazines and journals, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Escape Pod, The Fiddlehead, [PANK], and Strange Horizons.

In 2004, she immigrated to the USA from Canada. She has lived in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Kentucky, and New Hampshire, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

She runs Upper Rubber Boot Books, administers Small Press Week, volunteers for Postcards to Voters and More Than Medicine, and runs a surgical fellowship and the lives of four oncologists for a local hospital. You can visit her at www.joannemerriam.com.

 

 

Reviews & Mentions

Mentioned in:

Overall, I have to say that most of the stories were a solid 3-4 stars for me: there were many creative ideas, but only a few stories really shone for me. However, I also didn’t find any stories that I hated, which is always a good thing, and a pretty good achievement with more than 30 stories. . . . As you can see, there really is a variety in the stories – some of them involve mythology or legends, some are sci-fi with robots, and some are realistic/contemporary with a strong woman protagonist. All of the stories go to dark places, although the degree to which they do can also vary a lot.

—”Review: Broad Knowledge,” Alexa, A Thousand Worlds, 15 June 2018

Our Kickstarter was mentioned, promoted, or reviewed in:

Many thanks to Christi Craig for hosting the cover reveal for Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good. We changed covers after the Kickstarter, and the old cover was our Kickstarter exclusive!

20 November 2018

My dad’s not so sure that building flamethrowers and rockets in the driveway is such a good idea.

Our kickstarter was featured on the Barnes & Noble Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog, at the bottom of a post on 13 Queer Speculative Short Story Collections and Anthologies to Read Right Now!

Broad Knowledge has two very different stories of kidnapping: Therese Pieczynski’s “Three Days, Two Nights,” in which adolescent deaf girls are taken for ransom, and Rebecca Jones-Howe’s “Election Season,” in which a woman hiking is kidnapped by a fellow hiker and Trump fan who doesn’t like her politics.

While the plots, and the motivations and behavior of the kidnappers, are very different between the stories, both stories illustrate how a little ingenuity can save us.

Rebecca Jones-Howe writes:

“Election Season” is about none other than the US Presidential election of 2016. I wrote the story during the heat of the polarizing debates and added in the final details before election night on November 8th, when everyone was still convinced that Hillary would win.

The story is a bleak one. It’s a trope kidnapping story, a Lifetime Original where I curated all my frustration with the American political system. I hoped the ending would hold up, regardless of the election results. Then the worst-case scenario game show host won and I wasn’t so sure what my tale really meant to me, or to others.

Honestly, I don’t know what the future holds at this point. I’m a Canadian and I’m scared of the political climate (because we’ve got our own corrupt stuff happening up here, too). Talking about it all makes me uncomfortable because I have family, friends, co-workers who don’t think like I do. I have to respect that, at the very least. It’s easy to want to yell and scream and throw the middle finger to the people we disagree with.

Politics is a drastically polarizing landscape. Since 2016 I have found myself stepping away from heated discussions (especially online). It’s too draining, too exhausting. I find solace in the stories I write. I find it more constructive, and overall, easier to digest.

In Jones-Howe’s story, the kidnapper takes advantage of the protagonist’s politeness to put her in a vulnerable position (“I didn’t like him touching me, but I ignored the unease because I didn’t want to be rude.”) and she must figure out a way to escape. This is a dark, upsetting, necessary story paralleling the 2016 presidential election with kidnapping and rape.

In Therese Pieczynski’s lighter and more hopeful story, the girls (deaf, and adolescent, and, well, girls) are presumed to be completely helpless by their captors (“‘He thinks that because we’re deaf that we’re not smart,’ she signs.”), but tap into their knowledge of chemistry to change the odds against them:

Muriel and I are very smart. We’re also brave. You’d be surprised how many kids are afraid of the flame thrower my mom helped Muriel and me build. My mom’s an engineer and a science buff. She says that the thing about science is that you can’t just read about it. You have to do stuff. That’s how you understand it. You can read about a fire tornado, or a bomb, or a rocket, but until you make one yourself it’s hard to understand how one works. That’s why she helps us build stuff.

Donate now to support these authors!

 

About the Authors

Rebecca Jones-Howe is the author of the short story collection Vile Men. Her work has been published in [PANK], Punchnel’s, and Pulp Modern, among others. She lives in Kamloops, British Columbia and is currently at work on her first novel. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Therese Pieczynski has published in Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, River City, the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated, and in 2012 with Nancy Kress in New Under The Sun as part of the Stellar Guild series brought out by Arc Manor.

14 June 2018

Kickstarting Women Up To No Good!

 

Projects like the VIDA Count have demonstrated that women account for startlingly less than half of those published, and writers of marginalized sex and gender identities account for much less than their presence in the general population.

To help counteract that—and also because we thought it would be fun—we started the Women Up To No Good series, which focuses on “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet.

There are other imbalances too, most notably race, and while we have no formal requirement for inclusion of writers of color, we strive for diversity in all of our anthologies.

Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good are anthologies of writing by women and authors of marginalized sex and gender identities, about female protagonists whose knowledge or appetites are critical to their stories.

We’re raising money to be able to pay our authors professional rates, and to properly promote the anthologies so they get the attention they deserve. Our hope is to get the Women Up To No Good series on a solid enough footing that sales of the books will support all future anthologies.

 

Broad Knowledge authors

Sharp & Sugar Tooth authors

Check out our Kickstarter here.

1 April 2018

Announcing the table of contents for Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good

Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good, a feminist anthology of dark fiction and darker knowledge, is forthcoming in spring 2018. We’re delighted to announce the table of contents:

  • Charlotte Ashley, “She Falls”
  • R. S. Benedict, “Clara Vox”
  • Megan Chaudhuri, “First mouse model of Innsmouth Fish-man Syndrome draft 2 USE THIS VERSION – edits by MK.doc”
  • Autumn Christian, “Flowers for Dogman”
  • Vida Cruz, “Blushing Blue”
  • Christina Dalcher, “Vox”
  • Sarina Dorie, “The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire”
  • L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.”
  • A. T. Greenblatt, “Five Meters Ahead, Two Centuries Away”
  • Claudine Griggs, “The Cold Waters of Europa”
  • Audrey R. Hollis, “Your Life Will Look Perfect From Afar”
  • Joanna Michal Hoyt, “Taking It Back”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Election Season”
  • Ezzy G. Languzzi, “Viva La Muñeca”
  • Maggie Maxwell, “Like I Need a Hole in the Head”
  • Rati Mehrotra, “Make Pretty”
  • Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría, “Liquid Glass” (trans. Lawrence Schimel)
  • Premee Mohamed, “Below the Kirk, Below the Hill”
  • Julie Nováková, “Frankenstein Sonata”
  • Wendy Nikel, “Maidens of the Sea”
  • Aimee Ogden, “Matched Set”
  • Therese Pieczynski, “Three Days, Two Nights”
  • Laura E. Price, “Mary in the Looking Glass”
  • Clarice Radrick, “The Red”
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “:: 23 commuter line chromosomes ::”
  • Tabitha Sin, “The Donor”
  • Angela Slatter, “The Song of Sighs”
  • D.A. Xiaolin Spires, “Sunbasker”
  • Priya Sridhar, “Tidal Bloom”
  • Julie Steinbacher, “Blood Sausage”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “Like Milkweed”
  • Liz Ulin, “Profanity”
  • Marie Vibbert, “Infinite Boyfriends”
  • Mingzhao Xu, “Think, Baby Turtle”
  • Xin Niu Zhang, “The Ladies in the Moon”

Look for your opportunity to pre-order this anthology during our Kickstarter next month—and stay tuned for the cover reveal in a couple of weeks here and at Christi Craig’s book blog!

12 September 2017

Contributor news!

It’s been a pretty long time—nine months!—since I’ve shared contributor news, so I have a long list of stuff for you to read and enjoy below.

 
Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

 
Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good contributors:

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How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens contributors:

the-grace-of-kings-9781481424271

 
The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom (which will be released next year) contributors:

 
Soles Series contributors:

 
The Twelfth Planet book Letters to Tiptree includes many talented writers, including URB authors Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Sarah Pinsker, Cat Rambo, Nisi Shawl, Lucy Sussex, Rachel Swirsky, and Bogi Takács.

And, finally, Flight 505: A Novella‘s author Leslie Bohem has a TV series with Hulu involving psychics and organized crime that’s going to be awesome.

31 October 2015

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good

a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction
—Best New Fiction

Print (978-1-937794-46-0)

Ebook (978-1-937794-43-9)

Out of print.

Go to: About | Goodreads | Reviews
Released 31 March 2015

ChooseWiselycover-print-front

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good is a feminist anthology of dark fiction, co-edited by H. L. Nelson and Joanne Merriam. Containing 35 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features Joyce Carol Oates, Aimee Bender, Diane Cook, and 33 other fearless women writers. In January 2016, it was nominated for a This Is Horror Award. It’s the first in the Women Up To No Good series.

About this book:

Table of Contents:

  • Janet Shell Anderson, “Every Purpose Under Heaven”
  • Sidney Archer, “Woman Enough”
  • Alisha M. Attella, “Rise”
  • Gwen Beatty, “Angel Thinks She Will Die Very Soon”
  • Aimee Bender, “Broke”
  • Tina Connolly, “Hard Choices”
  • Diane Cook, “Moving On”
  • Kathy Fish, “The Hollow”
  • Amina Gautier, “A Cup of My Time”
  • Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter, “Sisters”
  • Tina May Hall, “Vampire”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Better Places”
  • Andrea Kneeland, “Imagination”
  • Molly Laich, “Kristen Doesn’t Like Surprise Parties”
  • Heather Lindsley, “The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan”
  • Holly Lopez, “The Head”
  • Kelly Luce, “Rooey”
  • Mesha Maren, “Eminent Domain”
  • Jessica McHugh, “In the Silt”
  • Mary Miller, “This Boy I Loved a Rock”
  • Ellen Birkett Morris, “After the Fall”
  • Joyce Carol Oates, “Spotted Hyenas: A Romance”
  • Jennifer Pelland, “The Kennel Club”
  • Cat Rambo, “Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut”
  • Joani Reese, “Good Neighbors”
  • Marytza K. Rubio, “Clap If You Believe”
  • Nisi Shawl, “Looking for Lilith”
  • Quill Shiv, “The Bitter Sea”
  • Emily Slaney, “Bear Traps”
  • Amber Sparks, “We Dressed Up Like Other People”
  • Rachel Swirsky, “The Sea of Trees”
  • Meg Tuite, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
  • Damien Angelica Walters, “Girl, With Coin”
  • xTx, “Today I Am A Wife”
  • Bonnie ZoBell, “Tricking the Moon”

Contributor Bios:

Janet Shell Anderson has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for fiction and the Micro Prize for short fiction, published by Cease, Cows; decomP; FRIGG; Vestal Review; Gemini Magazine; Black Heart; Convergence; Grey Sparrow; and others. She likes flash fiction and is an attorney.

Sidney Archer is one of the pseudonyms of K.D. McCrite, popular author of children’s books and cozy mysteries. As Sidney Archer, she looks into the darker side of life, seeking redemptive qualities found in the shadows. She harbors passion for a well-crafted story, a unique plot twist, or a colorful phrase. Her books guide readers along narrow paths fraught with obstacles and illusion until light shines fully on what was hidden. Desolate Heart, a between-worlds novel, tells the story of a cursed painting, the man who has been trapped in it for a century, and the modern-day woman who finds him.

Alisha M. Attella lives in Long Beach, California with her two blond children and one black cat. In their tiny apartment she reads books, scratches out poems and stories, raises-up the children, and talks to the cat about writers and schedules and the wonders of publishing. She’s served as Managing Editor at Mojave River Press & Review and Cease, Cows, and her own work can be found in Lummox, East Jasmine Review, San Pedro River Review, Cadence Collective, and elsewhere.

Gwen Beatty is a sorority dropout from Iowa. She is an editor at First Stop Fiction and her website is the ridiculously convenient gwenbeatty.com.

Aimee Bender is the author of five books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tina Connolly lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first fantasy novel, Ironskin (Tor 2012), was nominated for a Nebula, and the sequels Copperhead and Silverblind are now out. She narrates for Podcastle and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, runs the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake, and her website is tinaconnolly.com.

Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature (Harper, 2014). Her fiction has been published in Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She won the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, and earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.

Kathy Fish’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Guernica, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She served as guest editor of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (Rose Metal Press, 2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011), and Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012).

Amina Gautier is the author of two short story collections: At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). More than eighty of her short stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train Stories, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her stories have been honored with the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, the Danahy Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Lamar York Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and the William Richey Award as well as fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, MacDowell Colony, Prairie Center of the Arts, the Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Writers in the Heartland, as well as artist grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel.

Tina May Hall lives in upstate New York where she teaches creative writing at Hamilton College. Her collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects won the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Collagist, Fourth River, and other literary magazines.

Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Daddy’s and Don’t Kiss Me and the novel, Ugly Girls. Find her at lindsayhunter.com.

Rebecca Jones-Howe lives and writes in Kamloops, British Columbia. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Pulp Modern, and Punchnel’s, among others. Her first collection of short fiction, Vile Men, will be released by Dark House Press in summer of 2015. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Andrea Kneeland is the author of How to Pose for Hustler (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015). Her stories and poems have appeared in more than 50 journals and anthologies. More work can be found at andreakneeland.com.

Molly Laich is a writer in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Hobart, [PANK], Midwestern Gothic, and beyond. You can read her blog at mollylaich.com.

Heather Lindsley’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons. Her fiction has also been in John Joseph Adams’s dystopian anthology Brave New Worlds, in Year’s Best SF 12, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and in Talking Back, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp. She has been featured on Escape Pod as a writer and on Podcastle as a reader, and her stories have appeared in Polish, Romanian, Russian, and French translations.

Holly Lopez lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband, pampered Doberman, and the growing number of offbeat characters mulling about in her head. Her work has appeared in Plots With Guns and Charlotte Viewpoint.

Kelly Luce’s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Jentel Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Kerouac House, and Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in Salon, O Magazine, Crazyhorse, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and other magazines. She’s the editorial assistant for the O. Henry Prize anthology and editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. She grew up in Illinois and currently lives in Austin, TX.

Mesha Maren is a fiction writer from southern West Virginia whose work appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Oxford American, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, and other literary journals as well as the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial.

Jessica McHugh is an author of speculative fiction spanning the genre from horror and alternate history to young adult. She has had seventeen books published in six years, including her bestselling Post Mortem Press thriller, Rabbits in the Garden, and the first two books in her edgy YA series from Evolved Publishing, The Darla Decker Diaries. More info on her speculations and publications can be found at JessicaMcHughBooks.com.

Mary Miller is the author of two books, Big World and The Last Days of California. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies including McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, the Oxford American, and New Stories from the South.

Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer and poet based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, wigleaf, and Paradigm. Her story “The Cycle of Life and Other Incidentals” was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story competition. Morris is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Her acclaimed fiction includes We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Jennifer Pelland is a two-time Nebula nominee for short fiction, and has a short story collection (Unwelcome Bodies) and novel (Machine) available from Apex Publications. Nowadays, she mostly belly dances. Find her at www.jenniferpelland.com.

Although currently on the road, Cat Rambo usually lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current Vice President of SFWA. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see kittywumpus.net.

Joani Reese is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Final Notes and Dead Letters, and the poetry collection Night Chorus, forthcoming from Lit Fest Press. Reese’s poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and featured in over seventy print and online venues. She has been poetry editor for THIS Magazine and senior poetry editor for Connotation Press—An Online Artifact and was fiction guest editor for Scissors and Spackle in 2013 & 2014. Reese is currently Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine MadHat Lit, the quarterly online presence of MadHat Publishing. Reese won the first Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize for her flash fiction and The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis for her poetry, where she earned her MFA. Reese won the 15th Glass Woman Prize in 2014 for her flash fiction and currently lives in Texas with six fine cats and some men. She also has a real job.

Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, CA.

Nisi Shawl’s acclaimed story collection Filter House was one of two winners of the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. She was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She edited WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity and with Dr. Rebecca J. Holden she co-edited Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Feminism, and African American Voices. With classmate Cynthia Ward she co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Shawl is a cofounder of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Tor books will publish her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair in Fall 2015. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.

Quill Shiv is a genre-blending writer living in Saugus, MA. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Haikus for Lovers (ed. Laura Roberts) and 1 Photo, 50 Authors, 100 Words: Flash Fiction (ed. Madison Woods), and in literary magazines such as Metazen and The Watermark. When not cross-stitching or blogging at www.QuillShiv.com, Quill spends her time perfecting the nap-to-coffee ratio.

Emily Slaney is 70% no confidence, with dark humor and a crooked smile. She describes her writing as nihilistic emotional satire because she likes to make you laugh before she pulls it all away from you. She lives in England with her husband and kids in a semi-detached madhouse where sarcasm is what passes for everyday speech. She has been published in Menacing Hedge, Revolt Daily, Solarcide, Parable Press, Thunderdome Magazine, and Cease, Cows. You can find more about Emily at: emilyslaney.com.

Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novella The Desert Places. Her second short story collection, The Unfinished World and Other Stories, is forthcoming in 2016. You can follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle, or at ambernoellesparks.com.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, and Clarkesworld Magazine. It’s also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, among others, and twice won the Nebula Award. Her second collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present and Future, came out from Subterranean Press in 2013.

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. She is the author of two short story collections, Bound By Blue (Sententia Books, 2013) and Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011), and three chapbooks, the latest titled Her Skin is a Costume (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale. She teaches at the Santa Fe Community College, is an editor for Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press, and has a column up at JMWW. She lives in Santa Fe with her husband and menagerie of pets. Her blog: megtuite.com.

Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, Glitter & Mayhem, Not Our Kind, and What Fates Impose. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of her short fiction, will be released in early 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, will be released later that same year from Dark House Press.

xTx is a writer living in Southern California. Her work has been published in places like The Collagist, [PANK], Hobart, The Rumpus, The Chicago Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Her short story collection Normally Special is available from Tiny Hardcore Press and her chapbook Billie the Bull is available from Dzanc Books. Her story “The Mill Pond” won the 2012 storySouth Million Writers Award. She says nothing at www.notimetosayit.blogspot.com.

Bonnie ZoBell’s new linked collection from Press 53, What Happened Here: a novella and stories, was released in 2014. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has held resident fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, and Dorland, received an MFA from Columbia University on fellowship, and currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College. Visit her at www.bonniezobell.com.

Susan Perabo is Writer in Residence and Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Who I Was Supposed to Be, and a novel, The Broken Places (both with Simon and Schuster). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. Her new collection of short stories is upcoming from Simon and Schuster in 2016.

In addition to co-editing Choose Wisely, Joanne Merriam has edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and 140 And Counting: an anthology of writing from 7×20. In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada and write The Glaze from Breaking. Her writing has also appeared in The Fiddlehead, [PANK], Per Contra, Strange Horizons, and The Journal of Unlikely Entomology. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition to co-editing Choose Wisely, H. L. Nelson is head of the online magazine Cease, Cows and Co-CEO of LitDemon.com. Her publications include Writer’s Digest, Nightmare, Lunch Ticket, [PANK], plus over 50 others in the last few years. H. L.’s poem “Absolution” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her fiction chapbook, The Sea is Only Meat, will come out this summer from Sundress Publications.

Stories from the book available online:

Reviews:

Composed of 35 gleefully dark short stories by and about women, this anthology is a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alice Monroe and agree that the minutely observed world of everyday life is just as viable a form of literature as the more adventurous fiction dominated by men, but, still, there’s something so energizing about girls who kill, or chase ghosts, or bide their time in strange worlds of the future. If there’s a mother daughter story in here, it’s likely to involve a little serial kidnapping as well. If dad was a sexual predator, then his little girl is going to be one too. Super heroes, with costumes, terrifying weapons, and all too human foibles abound. And the strange passage of time as a wife and mother? Tina May Hall describes it beautifully: “You remember the first six weeks of your firstborn’s life were the longest you’d ever known. Time slowed down into a milky trickle, stretched out, thinned. Then the rubber band snapped, and everything accelerated. An entire lacrosse season took place over the course of one rainy afternoon. Your knees sagged, wrinkled, tightened up again, grew bulbous as wormy apples in the time it took to walk to the ATM.” But this is the memory of a vampire crawling from her mausoleum in search or blood, not some elderly lady whiling away her last days in a nursing home. I don’t know how anyone can read this book and not feel energized.

—Vickie Fang, “Choose Wisely: 35 women up to no good,” Best New Fiction, 5 May 2015

What I enjoyed the most about this anthology was the range of characters: from doddering old attention seeking women, to women chased by their own demons (literally), to female serial killers and housewives striving to be perfect for their husbands. Every story showed a different type of woman facing situations that are both conceivable and inconceivable. . . This anthology is full of wonderful stories about women facing the roles they’ve chosen for themselves or had chosen for them – with glee, with sadness, with rebellion.

—Sharra Rosichan, “Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good: A Book Review,” Odds and Ends, 5 May 2015

After all, in a perfect world I’d just talk about how the anthology is all the things I mentioned above: strong, well written, and intriguing. Inside are a number of writers I downright worship. . . a stellar collection of high caliber writing.

—David S. Atkinson, “InReview: Choose Wisely,” InDigest, 30 April 2015

31 March 2015


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