Nisi Shawl, a James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner and current Nebula Award, Hugo Award, and James Tiptree, Jr. Award finalist, will be here at UAH to give a public reading, on October 16th, at 6pm in Wilson Hall 168.

Shawl is the author of the 2016 novel Everfair, a work that repurposes the science fiction genre of the alternate history to interrogate imperialisms past and present and the intersection of empire, race, and sexuality. Her novel imagines the intervention of steam technology and an international alliance politics in the Belgian Congo transforming Leopold’s “heart of darkness” into a critical utopia.

Her earliest published work appeared in Semiotext(e) alongside the likes of William S. Burroughs and fellow SF pioneers William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and J.G. Ballard. Her 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House garnered praise from SF luminaries like Ursula K. Le Guin.

In addition to being a highly prolific short story writer and essayist, Shawl is also editor of several groundbreaking anthologies of Afrofuturist, feminist, and queer speculative fiction. A 1992 graduate of the famed Clarion West Writers Workshop, which launched the career of Octavia E. Butler among numerous other minority writers of SF, Shawl now serves on its board. In 1997, she founded the Carl Brandon Society devoted to the promotion of racial diversity in SF and fantasy and in 2006 helped to create the society’s Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship.