This April will be the fifteenth annual Women in SF&F Month here at Fantasy Cafe, starting on the 1st! 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 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout the month, and there will also be a book giveaway next week (with one print copy for a US reader and one digital copy for someone outside the US!).
As always, guests will be discussing a variety of topics—the stories and narratives that help them see the world around them more clearly, the ideas and types of characters they explore in their work, the questions and points they keep in mind when writing, the power of asking “What if?” when creating fiction, the ways they find hope and continue to get words on the page, and more. I’m excited to share their essays with you this month, and I hope that these both give you some things to think about and help you find some new authors and books to read.
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 in a couple days! There will be guest posts on Wednesday and Friday with more to come on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout April. This week’s guests are as follows:
April 1: Lorraine Wilson (The Salt Oracle, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest)
April 3: Elaine Ho (Cry, Voidbringer; “Harmony” and More Artwork)
