Tomorrow marks the beginning of the thirteenth annual Women in SF&F Month! For the last several years, April has been dedicated to highlighting some of the many women doing amazing work in fantasy and science fiction on this blog, and the tradition continues this month. This site will be featuring guest posts by some of these writers throughout April with new pieces appearing weekly (usually on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), and there will also be a couple of book giveaways.
As always, guests will be discussing a variety of topics—the questions and themes they explore in their work, the unique power of speculative fiction and imagined worlds, retellings, female mentors, female villains, found family, war, STEM, and more. I’m looking forward to sharing their pieces 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 very excited for this year’s Women in SF&F series, which starts tomorrow with an essay and book giveaway! There are three guest posts this week appearing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the schedule is as follows:
April 1: Samantha Mills (The Wings Upon Her Back, “Rabbit Test,” “Anchorage“)
April 3: Premee Mohamed (The Butcher of the Forest, The Siege of Burning Grass)
April 5: Eliza Chan (Fathomfolk, “The Tails That Make You,” “One More Song“)
