For the second year in a row, Women in SF&F Month is opening with a guest post by Renay! She is one of the three awesome bloggers who run one of my favorite blogs, Lady Business, and she has also written articles for Strange Horizons. Lady Business is a great site for book reviews, discussions of television shows, and insightful commentary on subjects related to speculative fiction, and I also always find interesting articles to read in the Sidetracks posts. I have a particular fondness for the way Renay discusses fandom, and I always enjoy reading anything she writes.

As for what she’s sharing with us today… I’ll let her fill you in on the details!

It’s a new year and a whole new version of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Month. It’s a perfect time to get excited about women in genre, especially if you like a good reading list. If you do, well, you’ve come to the right themed event.

Last year, Kristen and I asked people to recommend ten science fiction and fantasy books by women that they loved and submit them to a list for compilation. We wanted to crowdsource, if not a definitive list, at least a list long and full of enough women writers that a reader looking for women writers would never lack for a recommendation.

I was humbled and overwhelmed by the incredible response we received. Almost 2500 individual recommendations from almost 200 people have created a list of epic proportions, of almost 1000 books: The Big Giant List of Fantasy and Science Fiction Books by Women.

This list is a perfect example showing that women have written stories since the beginning of the genre. Women have written fantasy and science fiction and told countless stories and examined other worlds in order to examine themselves and the world around them, to teach, to inspire, and to simply have fun. Women have always been here, writing, and there should never be another time in which people claim not to see us and see the worlds we’ve made and the stories we’ve told.

We’ve built a list containing a multitude of women’s voices and we hope everyone enjoys it. But we’re not done yet. Again this year, we want you to come share ten science fiction and fantasy books by women writers that you love with us until the end of April. They can be all new books, released since we did this last. They can be older titles. They can be a mixture of old and new. They can be books already on the list, or books not yet represented, as long as you love them. Visit the Recommend Books page to search for up to ten science fiction and fantasy books by women and submit them.

After the end of this month’s event, the curated submissions will be published as a new 2014 list that will later be merged with the 2013 list to make our list even more representative of the women writing in the field. Come help us continue to crowdsource the best list of SFF women writers. 🙂