Nisi Shawl
Nisi Shawl (born 1955) is an African-American writer, editor, and journalist. They are best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories who writes and teaches about how fantastic fiction might reflect real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, colonialism, physical ability, age, and other sociocultural factors. Section::::"Writing the Other", short stories, and awards/memberships. Shawl is the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of "Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction", a creative-writing handbook derived from the authors' workshop of the same name, in which participants explore techniques to help  them write credible characters outside their own cultural experience. Reviewer Genevieve Williams of speculative fiction magazine "Strange Horizons" summed up about this guidebook: "The practices advocated and concepts presented in "Writing the Other" may seem PC to some, but following them will help to ensure that an author gives more than lip service to diversity and is thoughtful about the creation and development of societies, cultures, and characters (which we all should be anyway). Much of what Shawl and Ward advocate is, quite simply, good practice: the avoidance of cliches, flat characters, unintended effects, and other hallmarks of lazy writing ." Shawl's short stories have appeared in "Asimov's Science Fiction", the "Infinite Matrix", "Strange Horizons", "Semiotext(e)" and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Brian Charles Clark of the fiction review site, "Curled Up" "With a Good Book," praised their debut collection, "Filter House" (2008) – which gathered 11 previously published and three original short fiction pieces – saying that: "Shawl’s keen sense of justice and their adamant anti-colonialism always ride just beneath the surface of their stories. Never didactic, Shawl possesses the gift of a true storyteller: the ability to let the warp and weft of plot and character do  their moral work for them." Shawl is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a 1992 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. They are a board member of Clarion West and one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society. Their stories have been shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, and "Writing the Other" received special mention for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2008, they won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for "Filter House", which was also shortlisted for a World Fantasy  Award. In 2009 their novella "Good Boy" was additionally nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Their 2016 novel "Everfair" was nominated for a Nebula Award. Section::::"Everfair". Shawl's first novel, Neo-Victorian, Belgian-Congo-set, steampunk story "Everfair", was released in September 2016 by Tor Books, with a cover illustration by award-winning, Hong Kong artist Victo Ngai. "Everfair" is an alternate history of the African Congo, Europe, and the United States, during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, where Shawl's science-fictional turning point is that "the native populations (of the Congo) had learned about steam technology a  bit earlier." Their novel imagines that British Fabian Socialists team up with African-American Christian missionaries to purchase land in the Congo Basin from Leopold II of Belgium, thus creating a speculative new nation in their version of history, where citizens could experiment with the freedoms they had lacked in their original homelands, as well as benefit from this key technology of the industrial revolution, that of steam engines. Contributions to women's, multicultural, and global speculative fiction. In 2009, Shawl donated their archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University. In 2011, their  longtime work in the women's speculative fiction was recognized, when Shawl was selected as Guest of Honor at WisCon 35. In 2015, recognized as one of the "go to" teachers and mentors within the speculative fiction community on pedagogical issues of diversity, they served as guest speaker both in the "Black to the Future: An Imagination Incubator" ("Ferguson is the Future") symposium of multicultural speculative fiction artists, academics, and creative writers, at Princeton University (held on September 14, 2015) and in the "Creating Futures Rooted in Wonder" symposium of fairy tale, science fiction, and indigenous storytellers and scholars, at  the University of Hawai'i (held from September 16–19, 2015), where they performed in author readings with Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and other indigenous writers, as well as led creative writing workshops. Shawl's novel "Everfair" joins with the growing movement of international speculative-fiction writers of color, including editorial efforts by Jaymee Goh of Malaysia and Joyce Chng of Singapore (author-anthologists behind the 2015 collection of Southeast Asian steampunk published in English, "The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia"), to repurpose the science fiction trope of alternate history in critical ways that foreground issues of colonialism, globalization , and culture. Afrofuturist and feminist sf anthologies. Shawl has edited several anthologies of speculative fiction, especially collections of Afrofuturist, feminist/LGBT, and African-American sf/fantasy short stories, including recent homages to pioneering black/queer sf novelists Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler: "Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany" (2015), co-edited with Bill Campbell, and "Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler" (2015), co-edited by Rebecca J. Holden. Shawl's anthology work has been part of their longtime participation within both the feminist and the African-American sf writing  communities, evidenced in their editing of "WisCon Chronicles Vol. 5: Writing and Racial Identity" (2011, generated from America's most venerable feminist sf convention); as well as in their stories' publication within women sf writers' literary experiments, such as "Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies" (2006, by feminist sf publisher Aqueduct Press) and within African-American speculative fiction collections, notably the groundbreaking "Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora" (2000). Personal life and influences. Shawl was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They started attending the Residential College of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts  in 1971 at the age of 16, but did not graduate. They live in Seattle, Washington, where they review books for the "Seattle Times" as a freelance contributor. Shawl is bisexual and uses they/them pronouns. They stated in 2018 that they increasingly identify as genderfluid. Among those who have influenced their work, they have named writers Colette, Monique Wittig, and Raymond Chandler; as well as speculative fiction authors Gwyneth Jones, Suzy McKee Charnas, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Howard Waldrop, and Eileen Gunn.