Writing ‘POC’ is not enough. It doesn’t merit applause, or points for diversity. What does merit applause and accolades is acknowledging and depicting unreduced minorities—especially marginalized voices—in writing. We are not a monolith. Our stories are as complicated and intersectional as anyone else’s.

by Leanna Renee Hieber

I’m often asked if my professional theatre and playwrighting background helps me as a fiction writer. It does in countless ways. Theatrical form, training and structure are holistically integrated into how I see the world and operate as a storyteller.

by Katherine Quevedo

Looking for unconventional, potentially striking ways to explore what it means to be human in your writing?  It may seem counterintuitive, but personification—ascribing human qualities to inanimate objects—can open new avenues to plumb the depths of human experience.

Registration is now open for the transformed professional development conference.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), today unveiled the virtual home for SFWA’s 2020 Nebula Conference Online and showcased features of the upcoming professional development conference for science fiction and fantasy writers.

by Martin Jenkins

One of the pleasures of genre is that it lets us identify a type of writing that we know we like. We’d feel short-changed if a crime novel didn’t feature a crime, after all, or if a romance didn’t put the travails of a relationship front and center. What we don’t want to see, however, is a mere repetition of genre tropes and clichés – it’s what is fresh and different in a work of fiction that keeps us turning the page while still being identifiably a genre work.

Welcome to the February edition of the SFWA Market Report. Please note: Inclusion of any market in the report below does not indicate an official endorsement by SFWA.

by Setsu Uzumé

From Kickstarter to ko-fi to patreon, the search for funding can be a huge challenge. I recently attended a lecture provided by the St. Louis chapter of the Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts on the subject of applying for grants. Some of the most basic hurdles include finding grants that might be a good fit for your work, and how to prepare your materials in a way to make it easy for the folks reading your submission.

Welcome to the January edition of the SFWA Market Report.

Welcome to the December edition of the SFWA Market Report.

News from Writing the Other:

Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford, administrators of Writing the Other online classes, are pleased to announce that their scholarship program, launched in 2016, is now retitled the Vonda N. McIntyre Sentient Squid Scholarship. This name change, in honor of the award-winning and beloved science fiction and fantasy novelist who passed away in April of this year, comes about not only because Vonda was a friend and mentor to both Shawl and Bradford, but also because without her there would be no scholarship fund.