Thank you so much to all of last week’s guests! In case you missed any of their essays, here’s a summary with links to guest posts from last week:

• Swati Teerdhala (The Tiger at Midnight) wrote an homage to unlikeable heroines such as Sansa Stark, a character she admired and felt was real, and discussed her initial concern that her own heroine, who seeks revenge for her family’s murder, needed to be “likeable.”
• Nalini Singh (Psy-Changeling, Psy-Changeling Trinity) discussed her love of reading and writing speculative fiction, a genre filled with wonder and freedom to explore.
• Hafsah Faizal (We Hunt the Flame) shared how she came to understand why she incorporated the girl disguised as a boy trope into her upcoming debut novel after her choice to do so was questioned in a way that felt wrong: “Isn’t it ironic that Zafira struggles with her gender-obscuring cloak while the author herself is covered?”
• Nafiza Azad (The Candle and the Flame) discussed intersectional feminism and the many ways of being a woman and expressing feminine strength in “The Strong Woman: Politics of Feminine Power in THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME.”
• Fran Wilde (The Bone Universe, The Fire Opal Mechanism) wrote about her appreciation for librarians and her love of stories featuring them—and shared six of her favorite fictional librarian heroines.

With April coming to a close, that’s the end of this year’s Women in SF&F Month. Thank you to all of this year’s guests for your wonderful essays and making another Women in SF&F Month amazing!

For those of you have may have missed any guest posts from earlier this month, you can browse through all of the Women in SF&F Month 2019 guest posts here, or you can find them individually below:

• Azad, Nafiza — “The Strong Woman: Politics of Feminine Power in THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME”
• Cordasco, Rachel — “The Women of International SFF”
• Daud, Somaiya — “Ideologies of Space”
• Faizal, Hafsah on the girl disguised as a boy trope in her novel
• Fitzgerald, Elizabeth — “Faerie YA and Valentine”
• Glass, Jenna on some favorite books with wonderful heroines
• Gratton, Tessa — “Death and the Fantasist”
• Harrow, Alix E. — “My Mother’s Sword”
• Hawke, Sam — “The Sewing Test”
• Huang, SL — “Being a Woman”
• Lostetter, Marina J. — “Learning to Feel the Shape of Stories”
• Martine, Arkady on motherhood and science fiction
• Mihalik, Jessie — “On Writing and Reading Science Fiction Romance”
• Renay from Lady Business on history, SFF fandom, and the list project*
• Sara from The Fantasy Inn — “The Many Strengths of Female Characters in Fantasy”
• Shannon, Samantha on inspirations for details in epic fantasy
• Singh, Nalini — “Wonder and Freedom”
• Suri, Tasha on fairy tales and Indian classical dance as inspirations for her magic system
• Teerdhala, Swati — “The Unlikeable Heroine”
• Wilde, Fran — “Six Favorite Fictional Librarian Heroines”

* The Reader-Recommended SFF Books by Women Project
In 2013, Renay started the recommendation list project linked on the sidebar on the right—and it’s been a part of Women in SF&F Month every year since! In addition to discussing history and SFF fandom in her guest post at the beginning of the month, she also unveiled the latest list of recommended books by women including submissions from 2018, and she also issued an invitation to add up to 10 science fiction and/or fantasy books by women that you read and loved so the list continues to grow! (If you have already added books during previous years and don’t remember which you have already recommended, you can add up to 10 books you discovered over the last year.)

Although April is nearly over, there is still time to recommend more books for the list using the link above. It will remain open for at least another couple of weeks to allow those just finding out about it time to enter some books.

Thank you so much for reading!