This April is the fourteenth annual Women in SF&F Month here at Fantasy Cafe, starting tomorrow! For the last several years, this month has been dedicated to highlighting some of the many women doing wonderful work in fantasy and science fiction, and the site will be featuring guest posts by some of these writers throughout April. There will be new posts appearing Monday–Thursday throughout most of the month, including a book giveaway this week.
As always, guests will be discussing a variety of topics—the inspirations and ideas behind their work, the ways they approach writing, their characters, their worlds, their thoughts on tropes, their experiences as writers, and more. I’m excited to share their essays with you this month!
The Women in SF&F Month Origin Story
In case you are unfamiliar with how April came to be Women in SF&F Month here: It started in 2012, following some discussions about review coverage of books by women and the lack of women blogging about books being suggested for Hugo Awards in fan categories that took place in March. Some of the responses to these—especially the claim that that women weren’t being reviewed and mentioned because there just weren’t that many women reading and writing SFF—made me want to spend a month highlighting women doing work in the genre to show that there are a lot of us, actually.
So I decided to see if I could pull together an April event focusing on women in science fiction and fantasy, and thanks to a great many authors and reviewers who wrote pieces for the event, it happened! I was—and continue to be—astounded by the fantastic guest posts that have been written for this series. And I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who has contributed to it.
If you’ve missed the series before and want to check out some of the previous posts, you can find some brief descriptions and links for the past few years on the following pages:
This Week’s Schedule
I’m looking forward to this year’s Women in SF&F series, which starts tomorrow! There will be guest posts on Tuesday and Wednesday and a science fiction book giveaway on Thursday. This week’s guests and feature are as follows:
April 1: Kamilah Cole (So Let Them Burn, This Ends in Embers)
April 2: M. H. Ayinde (A Song of Legends Lost, “The Walls of Benin City“)
April 3: Book Giveaway of One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson
