Sheree Thomas has been invited to Breadloaf!

Sheree Renée Thomas, author of two beautiful books published by Aqueduct, has been invited to attend a writer’s workshop with novelist Luis Alberto Urrea at Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont this summer. Out of hundreds of applicants only five were chosen to work with this award winning author, whom Sheree admires.

However, this brilliant opportunity comes with a steep price tag. That is where we all come in. Let's raise these costs for Sheree so she can pay the tuition, buy a plane ticket from Tennessee, leave her bills paid at home, (as she will lose paid work to attend the workshop,) and have some dollars left in hand for daily needs and emergencies. 

5,100.00 will cover these expenses. I hope that fans, friends, and colleagues who have admired Sheree’s brilliant writing, or benefited from her visionary editing and teaching, might step up with whatever they can spare. Let's make sure Sheree can take this great opportunity: work with an admired, master writer on her gorgeous new novel, network with other visionaries, and have time to create. As of this afternoon, she's nearly one-fifth there.

Above all, Sheree needs time to focus on her own writing without the constant pressure of financial worries and family obligations. She is an author who has lifted many, many other artists through her generous vision, editorial genius, and producing skills. Won't it be great for her to have a peaceful month to work her own stories and poems, and contemplate her own dreams?
(And then we get to read the new works, too!)

The tuition for the conference and workshop is due in April, 2018, so we have no time to lose. I believe we can do this! Let's make it happen for Sheree! Go here to contribute to the GoFundMe drive Pan Morrigan has set up to get Sheree to the conference.


Please give all you can, and share with everybody you know, as often as you can. I thank you for your consideration! Artists and lovers of the arts gotta stick together!

Please appreciate Sheree's brilliant resume right here, and go check out her gorgeous, groundbreaking books, too. They are available at Aqueduct Press. 
http://www.aqueductpress.com/authors/ShereeThomas.php

Sheree Renée Thomas is the two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award for her groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter anthologies (2001, 2005), named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the 2017 recipient of the L.A. Banks Award for Outstanding Achievement, a 2016 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow, and the 2015 Lucille Geier-Lakes Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press), named on the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Longlist and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems. Her stories and poetry are translated in French, Urdu, and Spanish and her essays, articles, reviews have appeared in the New York Times and ESSENCE. A multigenre writer, Sheree’s stories and poems appear in several anthologies, including The Ringing Ear edited by Nikky Finney and Ghost Fishing: Eco-Justice Poetry edited by Melissa Tuckey (University of Georgia Press). She has been honored with fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, the Millay Colony of the Arts, the NY Foundation of the Arts, VCCA, Ledig House, and Blue Mountain Center. Based in Memphis, Thomas is the Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and the founder of Black Pot Mojo Arts.

I love Sheree's stories and poetry, and so would love to read a novel by Sheree. 

++++++++++++++++++++

ETA: The funding goal has been met! Congratulations, Sheree! 

Black Speculative Arts Movement #BSAMfuturismo2017

I want to give a brief heads-up for an Afrofuturist event at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Saturday, April 22 (tomorrow!). Aqueduct authors Sheree Renee Thomas, Jennifer Marie Brissett, and Kiini Ibura Salaam will all be participating. For the full schedule of the conference, check out the official website: https://www.evensi.us/black-speculative-arts-movement-bsamfuturismo2017-bronx/194016603.

At 12pm a panel titled 25 YEARS OF AFROFUTURISM & BLACK SPECULATIVE THOUGHT, will feature  Dr Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas, moderated by Tiffany Barber. And after lunch, at 2 pm, Sheree Renee Thomas, Jennifer Brissett, Kiini Salaam, and Ibi Zoboi will present BLUE BLACK MAGIC WOMEN.

 I so wish I could attend. If you have a chance, it sounds like a wonderful--dare I say inspiriting-- way to spend the day.

2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award

I'm late to this party-- I've just seen the announcement for the 2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award. I've taken this from the Award's website:

Congratulations to Anna-Marie McLemore, who has won the 2016 Tiptree Award for her novel When the Moon Was Ours (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2016).

About the Winner

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore is a fairytale about Samir, a transgender boy, and Miel, an orphan girl who grows roses from her wrists and is bullied as a result. In fact, there is a fairytale within the fairytale: the first chapter telling us the version of the story that mothers would tell children for years after — before also telling us what that story leaves out. Then the book takes us through all of it, step by step, exploring the heartache and frustration that being and loving differently generates. Beautifully, the novel never lets go of its unique magical realism framework. While the thoughts and emotions these characters share are incredibly familiar to anyone who is queer or trans or has loved someone who is trans, the imagery and particular scenarios the characters encounter are also completely bright and new.

In the author’s note at the end of the book, Anna-Marie McLemore tells us that when she was a teenager she fell in love with a transgender boy who would grow into the man she married. This is their story, reimagined as legend.

 In addition to selecting the winners, the jury chooses a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list. These notes on each work are excerpted and edited from comments by members of this year’s jury.

This year’s Honor List is:


Eleanor Arnason, Hwarhath Stories:Transgressive Tales by Aliens (Aqueduct Press, 2016) — This is a wonderful collection of stories that examine the ways that culturally, deep-rooted assumptions around gender restrict vocation and recognition of skills. Arnason tells of a culture with significantly different gender assumptions and customs that lead to a number of subtly shifted societal impacts — both positive and negative.

Mishell Baker, Borderline (Saga Press, 2016) — A fascinating whodunit with wonderful characters, Borderline spotlights diversity and intersectionality. Most of the characters in this novel are viewed as disabled by others, even by each other. But the characters’ so-called disabilities give them advantages in certain situations. Understanding this helps the characters love each other and themselves. Almost every character can be described as having attributes that are both disabilities and advantages. What builds us up can bring us down. Or put another way: our imperfections are openings to beautiful achievements.

Nino Cipri, “Opals and Clay” (Podcastle, 2016) — A beautiful love story about solidarity. With just three major characters, this story does a lot with gender, demonstrating how gendering can be something one does to control or out of love.

Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic for Small Change (Aqueduct Press, 2016) — A beautiful story of magic and love that spans two centuries and three continents, moving between times and places through a book-within-a-book structure. Its 1980s protagonists are a family who has been torn apart by an act of homophobic violence. Through a discovery of their past, they are able to reconnect and find love again. Among other things, this novel depicts an amazing range of queer characters. Importantly, the book de-colonizes these representations, making queerness not a white or American thing, but something that emerges in different shapes and structures at different times and places, particular to individuals as well as the cultures and communities that they are a part of.

Rachael K. Jones, “The Night Bazaar for Women Becoming Reptiles” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2016) — A moving story set in a world where people live separate lives by night and day, with an opposite-sex lover by day and same-sex lover by night as the standard family structure. The theme of being trapped in one’s body and circumstances and in the customs of one’s times is dealt with well. The metaphor of a city/body that traps people in prisons of identity was very powerful. A surprising (yet well set up) twist to the story broadens its scope.

Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway (Tor Books, 2916) — This is a lovely YA novel about teenagers who return to our world, against their wishes, from magical lands that they entered through secret pathways — a magic door, an impossible stairway at the bottom of a trunk, a mirror. Their parents cannot understand their pain and misinterpret the stories their children tell and send their children to Miss West’s Home for Wayward Children. Miss West, herself a returned child, helps them deal with their separation or return to what they all think of as their real homes. This novel came to the attention of the Tiptree jury because of the reasons the children are taken from or rejected by their magical worlds. The protagonist, Nancy, is asexual, and finds an ideal world through her door. A character named Kade was born Katie, and discovers he is a boy, not a girl. He is thrown out of Fairyland as punishment for his transition. Two twin girls named Jack and Jill take up identities opposite from those their parents imposed upon them. There are beautiful lessons here about the importance of finding one’s home–that place where one can be one’s self. An emotionally engaging novel.

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (Tor Books, 2016) — This book will start conversations about gender, philosophy, religion, government, even war.The judges perceived contradictions within this book that may be resolved in the sequel, but these only serve to spark interest. In the future in which it is set (the twenty-fifth century of our world), gendered language is considered taboo in most circles and gender/sex-related cues are minimized and overlooked in clothing, vocation, and all other public areas of life. However, the book slowly reveals that gender stereotypes, sexism, and sexual taboos still remain strong despite the century’s supposed enlightenment and escape from such notions.

Johanna Sinisalo, The Core of the Sun (Grove Press/Black Cat, 2016) — This emotional, moving and thought-provoking novel, set in an alternate present in Finland, provides a critique of heteronormativity, eugenics, and all forms of social control, done uniquely and with humor. In this alternate present, the government values public health and social stability above all else. Sex and gender have been organized as the government sees fit, much to the detriment of women, who are bred and raised to be docile. All .drugs, including alcohol and caffeine, have long been banned. Capsaicin from hot peppers is the most recent substance to be added to the list. Our protagonist, Vera/Vanna, is a capsaicin addict. Consuming peppers provides an escape from a world that has treated her horribly. Most chapters are from Vera/Vanna’s perspective, but others relate the history, laws, fairytales, and other literature of this fictional Finland.

Nisi Shawl, Everfair (Tor Books, 2016) — In this gorgeous steampunk revisionist history of anticolonial resistance, a coalition of rebels defeat King Leopold and transform the former Belgian Congo into Everfair: a new nation whose citizens comprise Africans, European settlers, and Asian laborers. Told from many different perspectives, the story switches among the viewpoints of a dozen protagonists. This novel shows how relationships can grow over time between people of different races, classes, and religions as they build community together. Characters work through their internalized racisms and demonstrate how this is necessary for those in interracial relationships.

But Wait — There’s More!

In addition to the honor list, this year’s jury also compiled a long list of twelve other works they found worthy of attention.


All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor, 2016)
The Waterdancer’s World, L. Timmel Duchamp (Aqueduct Press, 2016)
Lily, Michael Thomas Ford (Lethe Press, 2016)
King of the Worlds, M. Thomas Gammarino (Chin Music Press, 2016)
“Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism,” Porpentine Charity Heartscape (Terraform, 2016 – an online interactive story),
Cantor for Pearls, M.C.A. Hogarth (De La Torre Books, 2016)
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit, 2016)
An Accident of Stars, Foz Meadows (Angry Robot, 2016)
Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, Sheree Renée Thomas (Aqueduct Press, 2016)
Suddenly Paris, Olga & Christopher Werby (CreateSpace, 2015)
The Arrival of Missives, Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories, 2015)
The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood (Europa Editions 2016)

Now What?

Anna-Marie McLemore, along with authors and works on the Honor List, will be celebrated during Memorial Day weekend at WisCon 41 in Madison, Wisconsin, May 26-29, 2017. She will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2016 judges were Jeanne Gomoll (chair), Aimee Bahng, James Fox, Roxanne Samer, and Deb Taber.


Reading for 2017 will soon begin. The panel consists of Alexis Lothian (chair), E.J. Fischer, Kazue Harada, Cheryl Morgan, and Julia Starkey.


The Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via our recommendation page. Full information on all the books mentioned above will be in the Tiptree Award database before the end of March 2017.

*******************************

It's me again, just to express special pleasure that two Aqueduct Press books (and three Aqueduct Press authors) are on the Honor List, and two Aqueduct Press books are on the long list. I have to say, between the works named above and the Lambda Literary Award finalists' list, no one can say that 2016 wasn't a fruitful year for those of us hungry for sharp, challenging reading.  

Sheree Renée Thomas's Sleeping Under the Tree of Life

I'm pleased to announce the release of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, a collection of poetry and stories by Sheree Renée Thomas, as the fiftieth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. Sleeping Under the Tree of Life evokes the realm of ancestral knowledge with a deep respect for the natural world, a love of language, and an invitation—for survival, and asks: Who survives without being transformed? Beneath luminous layers of imagery and mythology, science and nature, fantasy and the recounting of history, is the grace and tenderness of a poet's heart, the unwavering gaze of an oracle's vision, and the dreamlike whimsy of a storyteller's mind. Hope, love, and hard truths spring from these pages of a writer whose imagination conjures an unforgettable journey. Readers enter these poems and stories the way some souls enter church, a quiet garden, or a stand of trees—for rest, for the blessing of silence and reverie, for beauty if not redemption.

Last week Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review: "The lyrical gifts of Thomas, editor of the celebrated Dark Matter anthologies, are on full display in this collection of poetry and short fiction. Her poems are imbued with rich, sensual imagery and range over subjects mundane, fantastical, and somewhere in between: the memory of a mother braiding her daughter’s hair in “Rootwork”; an oracle in the form of a homeless woman whose “mismatch clothes/ cover robes that got wings” in “Visitation of the Oracle at McKain Street”; and the mythological Arachne, “Star weaver of tears,” in “Arachne Star” and “Arachne on the Rebound.” She invokes the rhythms of African-American ring shouts and the dense, humid atmosphere of the American South. Her stories include reinventions of mythology, such as Medusa and Arachne ambushing the goddess Athena in revenge in “Arachne & Medusa Jump Athena,” and haunting modern folktales about women with their roots in rivers (in “River, Clap Your Hands”) and swamp trees (in “Tree of the Forest Seven Bells”), with references to recent natural disasters and human-created pollution. Thomas’s skill with poetry and prose is remarkable, and even the shortest poems in this volume contain ideas and images that will linger in the reader’s mind."

The collection has also received a good deal of advance praise:

 "Sleeping Under the Tree of Life is a feat of literary conjuration. Poetry, prose combine in a mythic discourse that combines African, Indigenous, and European tropes to explore the power and plaints of woman hood; the thin line between life and death; the power of the Fates; the volatility of nature; a desire for and the achievement of transformation.... The texts here offer a profound understanding of the Black American South—where trees are sources of shade and succor or memorials to humanity's murderous traits. And it is a sly portrait of Memphis, Tennessee, Thomas' hometown. This is a bold book full of taller than tall tales and delicate lyrics-where birth, death, sex, magic and discovery walk the same path and haunt the writer's dreams. Join her on this journey and find out what it is like to sleep under that tree." —Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected, Painkiller, Femme du Monde, and The Weather That Kills

"These are wise women poems, country lush, bound by myth and science. Thomas's exquisite language inhabits constellations, delta crossroads and the deepest forest to explore our collective troubles. Thomas is also a master storyteller weaving a devilish braid of ancestral reclamation; of sirens, goddesses and elders wrapped in new world grit and a modern hoodoo evocative of the pastoralism of Jean Toomer. This powerful collection is a call to 'save us from ruin.'" —Jacqueline Johnson, author of A Woman's Season

"'Out of the mouth of this holler,' Sheree Renée Thomas' Sleeping Under the Tree of Life springs to life—to give us life. Continuing the work she set out with her Dark Matter anthologies and her first collection, Shotgun Lullabies, Thomas, in this pristine, poised narrative of our beginnings, extends and expands the dialogic paradigm of an art form and genre the world is finally catching up to, to go beyond what Michael McDonald and James Ingram sing— 'Yah Mo Be There!'—to take us back to the future of an Africa that said/that says, as the Bantu— 'Nommo Be There!' In Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, Sheree Renée Thomas collages together a narrative of necessity where her full literary powers and prowess are on full display like a Dogon cup from an ancient river where we drink in the magic of winged words necessitating change, each poem and prose piece not lulling us to sleep—but giving us life, and making sure we stay WOKE!" —Tony Medina, author of Broke Baroque and An Onion of Wars

"Sheree R. Thomas is a hoodoo conjure women. Sleeping Under the Tree of Life is a book of story and poem incantations. Thomas calls on the ancestors, the spirits, and our natural Mississippi mud/ blood history to talk to the future. She tasks, thrills, and twists our minds. Her word magic feels so good in my mouth, I have to jump up and speak her blues, jazz, and warrior woman sass out loud! Sleeping Under the Tree of Life is a book to read again and again and again!" —Andrea Hairston, author of Redwood and Wildfire and Will Do Magic for Small Change

"Sheree Renée Thomas gives us a whirlpool of poem and story, a 'wild and strangeful breed' of cosmology that maps each star from Machu Pichu to Congo Square, from Legba to Medusa. Here in these pages is a ringshout around a tree of brown woman hands and riverbent fantasy, all quilted up in 'indigo/and black silt/ twisting the thick strands/ as if starting a slow fire.' The baptism awaits, the water is living, and we all rise with the tide of these epistles from such a wondrous, ancient, future-bound poet." —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio and Leadbelly

"Sleeping Under the Tree of Life is a collection of tales and poetry reflecting the mythical origins of life inside the dream of 'trees, rivers, stars, blood.' Through Thomas' words every day birth, desire, death becomes a beautiful, dream-like dance full of magic, light and dark. We are shown that things are more than they seem and under the most common skin lies infinite power." —Linda D. Addison, award-winning author of "How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend"

"This collection of vivid, intense and artful speculative poetry and short fiction is a journey through beautiful, treacherous landscapes simultaneously ancient, futuristic and of-the-moment, inhabited by deities, demiurges, and drylongso conjurefolk. These guides, guardians and shape-shifting survivors illuminate Thomas' meditations on the joys and ravages of history and the resilience of love. Sleep beneath this Tree, dream these dreams, and arise changed."—Ama Patterson

'In Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, Sheree Renée Thomas finds the mythic grandeur in human frailty and apocalyptic storms. This is a book of goddesses and magic, of songs mournful and joyful, of restless trees and falling skies, told in a voice like a river's hypnotic rush. You'll welcome the webs these poems and stories weave." —Mike Allen, three-time Rhysling Award winner, Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and editor of Clockwork Phoenix

"Sleeping Under The Tree of Life is a powerful invocation by a literary rootwoman working with both hands, a fusion of prose and poetry that brings to mind Toomer's Cane or Jones' Corregidora, works graced with lyrical riffs like little blue bottles glistening in the sun. With this work, Sheree Thomas has attained a new level of artistic maturity, her unique voice, a Wanganegressian fusion of contemporary and the traditional, singing out in a mastery of craft and vision that adorns every page. Her poetry claims the reader long before prose narratives are introduced in a seamless weave working that boundary/fusion of genres where new aesthetics are born. It is everything a work of art should be, a challenging engagement with the human condition that will try your soul with moments of astounding grace. Sleeping Under the Tree of Life represents a new level of craft, vision and achievement for a consummate artist and cultural icon. With this one, Sherée Thomas' place is assured. When great soul meets great work, what you get is a thing of wonder." —Arthur Flowers, author of I See the Promised Land, Mojo Rising, and Another Good Loving Blues

"In Sleeping Under the tree of Life, Sheree Renée Thomas has created a gorgeously mind-altering collection of poetry and story. She riffs off history like a Jazz master, while invoking a poly-rhythmic present shot through with prophesy. With pulsating word alchemy, she spins luminous imagery, astounding characters, and deep-sea insights. I say, this book will put a spell on you—change you, and rearrange you. Read it right now, twice." —Pan Morigan, composer, Wild Blue and Castles of Gold

Sleeping Under the Tree of Life is available now in print and e-book editions through Aqueduct's site, and will soon be available elsewhere.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013, pt.22: Sheree Renée Thomas

2013: from Ashe to Amen and Beyond
by Sheree Renée Thomas

The year has seen me thinking about spiritual matters and exploring its roots and history in my work and in some of the art I admire most. Perhaps it is the loss of dear friends and loved ones, or the ever-growing sense and recognition that none of us are promised tomorrow, but I have enjoyed this exploration and hope it will yield sweet fruits in my own work. One of the highlights of the year was having an opportunity to help celebrate the legacy of Octavia E. Butler with writer Tananarive Due and some of my favorite authors, filmmakers, and artists at Spelman College this past Spring.

Between what felt like a family reunion led by Steven Barnes’s lively and inspiring informal “green room” talk on health and happiness from a focused physical and spiritual practice, to beautiful futuristic art and films, and a multimedia lecture on Afrofuturism and music by celebrated DJ Lynnee Denise (check out her Girls Gone Vinyl Project)

where she was literally flat-foot jamming in Spelman’s Museum, I have to say the new year and Spring season started off quite beautifully after what felt like the longest winter ever.
 
 Another fun conference was Onyxcon V held in August at the historic Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta. Onxycon is the Southeast’s largest convention celebrating the presence of the African diaspora in popular arts.

Founded by artists Iyabo Shabazz and Joseph R. Wheeler, this summer’s conference covered writers’ and artists’ tips to how to collect and appraise black popular media like comic books and vintage movie posters. The participants included museum curators, comic book professionals, and even the founder of a soul food museum. The other added treat besides meeting new friends was a chance to see a small but beautiful exhibit of paintings by children’s book illustrator R. Gregory Christie who also runs an open studio in Atlanta.

The conference was a great experience before the back-to-school grind. The end of the summer meant the end to some of my favorite guilty pleasures, including watching obscure and fascinating foreign indie films like I’m Not Scared, the amazing Italian movie that I won’t spoil for you since it was a little surprising and made this closet tearjerker boohoo inexplicably, or the fabulous silent, black-and-white Spanish Snow White adaptation I saw.

Set in the 1920s, Blancanieves explores the world of bullfighting, where the neglected and abused daughter of a beloved Spanish matador is rescued by a family of bullfighting dwarves (I kid you not!), who goes on to glory and tragedy, as befitting the Grimm fairy tale. The cinematography was beautiful, the costumes and actors were memorable even though as usual, the seven (or is six?) dwarves are never given anymore than broad strokes of characterization.

Special praise should be given to the wonderful child actress, Sofia Oren, who delivered a pitch perfect performance, and I loved the music and the over-the-top scenery-chewing satire of the stepmother’s performance. Maribel Verdú as Encarna was a Femme Fatale Betty Boop with some serious issues and a fierce wardrobe to match. While Blancanieves is no The Artists (it didn’t seem to take itself quite as seriously and in case you were wondering, no, no bulls were slaughtered on or off camera for this film), it is well worth watching in my humble opinion, especially for anyone who enjoys a little lore and magic in their movies.

My other guilty pleasure this summer included fussing at the Magical Negroes of the show I love to hate but can’t stop watching, The Vampire Diaries, and its great spin-off series set in New Orleans, The Originals with yet another Magical Negroe with an interesting backstory. Neither of these shows can be watched without also consulting TV.com’s hilarious photo recaps.

Speaking of Magical Negroes, in late September, a couple of days before my birthday, I saw stop. reset, the new Signature Theatre play by actress and playwright Regina Taylor in New York.

Taylor’s science fiction play set in a black independent publisher’s Chicago offices was a moving meditation on how grief can scar the soul and how future tech can enslave or set us free. How one took the play’s ending depended upon whether or not you saw lead Carl Lumbley’s final “transition” as a visitation of the spirits, a riding of the loa, or a case, as one critic saw it, as “contagious insanity.” Needless to say, I loved this nuanced work and the awesome public discussion that took place following the performance.

And speaking of contagious insanity… watch Tina Mabry’s Mississippi Damned. For me, it was a little like watching a Kara Walker picture come to life. Enough Said.

Ashe to Amen: African-Americans & Biblical Imagery is a sensational, provocative traveling exhibit that features work by 50 artists who explore a wide range of faiths, from hoodoo to Vodou, from traditional African religious influences to Islam and Christianity. My favorite works in the exhibit included the amazing 3-dimensional praise tent that is crocheted by artist Xenobia Bailey. Xenobia is an astonishing artist who came of age in Seattle among a few of Jimmi Hendrix’s influences

 and has continued over the years to “press on to Paradise” as she says, keeping her dream and her vibrant art alive. Her latest journey led her last month to a group art show in the United Arab Emirates which she blogs about here: http://xenba.blogspot.com/

This wildly colored textile sculpture is large enough for a priestess or a mother and child to climb inside it, and it is vaguely reminiscent of the intricately woven Camerounian Bamileke crowns worn in Central Africa (or perhaps more memorably, by ZZ Top).

“Sister Paradise’s Great Wall of Fire Revival Tent” by Xenobia Bailey

Antique Bamileke hat and contemporary iconic hat worn by musician Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top



 



Bailey’s sculpture seemed sentient, magically alive with its two great unblinking eyes staring down at museum visitors, as if the “Mystic Seer” could see right into our souls and minds. I must admit that I had to resist my inner child’s desire to climb right in and sit cross-legged upon the emblazoned sun that adorned the floor beneath the sculpture.

 Renee Stout’s thrilling neon installation piece, “Church of the Crossroads” evokes Esu, Elegba, and Papa Legba more than the hooded Ku Klux Klan reference that was featured in the accompanying description of my local museum in Memphis, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. Organized by New York’s Museum of Biblical Art and curated by artist and scholar Leslie King-Hammond, Ashe to Amen is one of the first exhibits that trace the shared roots and connections between African and Biblical traditions.

Three poetry and fiction volumes by the late author Wanda Coleman (1946 – 2013) and an essay in The Nation have had an impact on my writing life. When I first read A War of Eyes and Other Stories and African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1988 and 1990) I had no idea that Coleman also had a connection to a creative writing institution that would serve as a safe haven and encouraging lighthouse for my own journey. A married mother of two by age twenty, Coleman worked numerous day jobs while seeking out writers’ workshops on nights and weekends to help hone her craft and develop the gift she had shown since she began publishing her poetry in a local newspaper at age thirteen. The Watts Writers Workshop was one of those invaluable spaces for Coleman.

January 1, 1966

January 1, 1966: Budd Schulberg (center) conducts a session of the NEA-supported Watts Writers' Workshop. Schulberg created the workshop in his living room in response to the 1965 Watts riots. Photo credit Los Angeles Times 

This workshop founded by Budd Schulberg (probably most well known for his award-winning screenplay, On the Waterfront) would also inspire Fred Hudson, a former librarian, playwright of The Legend of Deadwood Dick, and Paramount Studios screenwriter (The Education of Sonny Carson) to create in 1971 the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Manhattan where I was a student and later, an instructor.

                                                   Nat Love aka “Deadwood Dick”

                   
                             Fred Hudson, Founder of The Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center

Wanda Coleman began her writing journey as a reader seeking refuge from the racism of 1950s society and the cruelty that can mark anyone’s youth. Seeking solace, she said that she became an avid reader at a time when public libraries “discouraged Negro readers.” A native of Watts and long considered its unofficial poet laureate, Coleman published over twenty books over four decades, writing eloquently and with dark humor about racial injustice and gender inequality. Not one to mince words, this former critic and columnist for the Los Angeles Times once caused a mini tempest in America’s literary community when she published a scathing critique of beloved Maya Angelou’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven and a follow-up response in The Nation entitled “Book-Reviewing, African-American Style.” This essay got her banned from at least one independent black bookstore and earned her publishers a flood of letters.

At a time when aspiring black women writers were faced in the public sphere with laboring in the wake of literary giants like Angelou or Morrison, Wanda Coleman’s collection, Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories,1968-1986 (Black Sparrow Press, 1987) was an exciting discovery that offered yet another distinctive voice and view of life that inspired me. And while she is no longer here to offer her powerful live readings or no-nonsense, hands-on writers’ workshops, the spirit and brilliance of her writing—her poetry, her fiction, her essays--will continue to inspire other women writers to find their voices and carry on.

                                                     Wanda Coleman (1946-2013)

 Sheree Renée Thomas is the author of the chapbook, Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, Conversation Series) and the editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Her work has appeared in storySouth, Callaloo, Essence, The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, Renaissance Noire and in anthologies, including most recently The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry. In 2014, Sheree will speak in New York at the exhibition panel for the Studio Museum of Harlem’s Afrofuturist exhibit, The Shadows Took Shape and at the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) symposium, “Alien Form: Genre and the Production of Ethnic American Literatures,” hosted at Pennsylvania State University.

Sheree Thomas judging speculative fiction contest

Heads up! This notice just arrived in my mailbox:

Ragazine.CC is offering a $1,000.00 prize for the best piece of speculative fiction completed by a person of color in 2013. We will begin accepting electronic (e-mail) entries dated on or after March 20, 2013, and on or before June 20th. The winner will be announced in September; the prize includes publication in Ragazine.CC. Second and third place selections also will be published in the same or subsequent issues of Ragazine.CC.

The final judge for the contest is Sheree Renée Thomas, a well-known fiction writer and editor of the Dark Matter series and author of Shotgun Lullabies (a CP volume).

Editor Joe Weil writes: "I conceived of the contest as a way to bring attention to both an under-served genre of writing (serious, artistic speculative fiction) and an under-served population of writers weilgardenrelated to that genre: speculative writers of color. Many contests are far broader, but this is meant  to highlight  a type of writing and writers who may not be at all that well known to our readers and who deserve recognition."

You can find the contest rules here: http://ragazine.cc/2013/03/contest/. (Note, there is an entry fee.)

Aqueductista News

*Sheree Renée Thomas has a post, "An Idea so Crazy It Might Come True," up on the New York Times blog.

*Cynthia Ward is interviewed here.

*Liz Henry's The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 3: Carnival of Feminism is newly reviewed here.

More e-books from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct Press has just released several more titles--all of them in the Conversation Pieces series-- in e-book formats. The latest titles are:

Aliens of the Heart by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Candle in a Bottle by Carolyn Ives Gilman
A Brood of Foxes by Kristin Livdahl
Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh
De Secretis Mulierum by L. Timmel Duchamp
Shotgun Lullabies by Sheree Renée Thomas

Each can be purchased for $5.95. You can find them all here.

Black Pot Mojo by Sheree Renée Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas, author of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories and Poems, returned last year to her native Memphis after years of living in New York. Not surprisingly, she has been reflecting on that return, and on her life as a writer. She's generously agreed to let me post her essay on the subject here.

Back Pot Mojo
by Sheree Renée Thomas

Of Goals & Dreams

As a Memphian who lived in New York for fifteen years, I now find myself going full circle. This perhaps is as it should be. Over the years I had grown to think of myself as a writer born with twin tongues, a journeyman code switcher, navigating the boundaries of language and lore. Part elderstory and praisesong, black pot mojo and tall tales, my stories and poetry reflect my family's roots and history in the Mississippi Delta, the experiences that shaped our traditions and speech, as well as my love of science fiction—what others call speculative fiction, magical realism, or as Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote of Haiti, “the marvelous real.” As a multigenre artist who writes fiction as well as poetry, I have many interests, with the common thread of narrative. I try to write stories about ordinary people facing the extraordinary.

As I continue to develop and strengthen my own craft, I hope to conjure art that lives beyond the page, casting a positive spell on readers as they journey through life. I've noticed that the characters and voices in my work tend to be intergenerational, which I believe is due in part to my upbringing in the South among the shotgun houses and porch step storytelling I heard from my grandparents and other elders in North Memphis. As I've watched my two daughters, Jacqueline and Jada, grow over the years, I've come to appreciate the folk wisdom in some of our world's oldest tales and the need for all of us to continue sharing them across the generations, even if that means carrying some of these tales straight to the stars. Mythology, music, families, geography, the trickster nature of history, and the wondrous potential we all have to change and challenge ourselves are some of my major personal influences.

Of Roots & Wings

Where I am from, a river city perched on the bluff of the Mississippi, the language you are born with, the one which you are comforted in, reprimanded, raised, praised, and chastised in, is called your navel tongue. And as a daughter of the South, I was born with twin tongues. One held the language I spoke in public, the other the language elders taught me from the porch in our home in North Memphis, a crowded, tumble down area in the backbone of the city known as much for its blackfolk and black music, its barbecue and blues, as it is for its distinctive black speech.

Around me, the elders leaned across porches, poked their heads outside frail screen doors with wire mesh tiny enough to withstand the onslaught of Memphis mosquitoes. Between the neighborhood gossip and chit-chat, church news and political banter, jokes and liberal ‘lessons’ about the how and why of blackfolk’s history in our hometown, I learned that to be understood clearly, and most importantly—trusted-- one spoke in one tongue among neighbors, family, and friends, and another among everyone else.

From grandmother to grandfather, aunt and uncle, I learned very quickly which tongue was valued in the world outside our front door, and yet over the years I could not reject the voice that had instructed and nurtured me from birth. Today when I think about how deeply I was touched by the twin tongues of blackfolk who remembered a time when even our city’s libraries were off-limits to them, I realize that storytelling, the oral tradition that instructed and engaged me was such a rich and complex part of my childhood that it is little question how or why I began my journey toward writing.

Growing up, I read Black Arts Movement texts, from Baraka, Giovanni, Madhubuti, and Sanchez to the Gothic literature, science fiction and fantasy we loved best, Poe, Bester, and Ray Bradbury, Asimov and Tolkien. Frustrated with the fleeting “magical negroes” that appeared in some of science fiction and fantasy works, black characters with little community or purpose of their own, I stopped reading the genre for a while and began looking at Black literature.As I struggled to understand what it might mean to be a black woman in our world today, I needed to read works by writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, and Gayle Jones. Their brave words helped me write myself, articulating perspectives and histories that would inform me as a young person and as an emerging writer. And as I started writing more of my own stories, some of them were speculative in form, but I didn't think of them in this way. Writing was a personal ritual, an act of self-defense in some ways. But smart as everyone thought I was, I became a statistic, the infamous teenage mother, my senior year in high school. My newborn daughter was in the audience when I made my valedictory speech. Writing saved me. I wrote through my early thrilling and frightening experiences of motherhood, and I wrote through my anxieties at an affluent, respected small liberal arts college where I was one of literally a handful of African-American and the only First Year student who had a stroller and a carrier. Between the “baby daddy” drama, culture shock, and the multiple part-time jobs I held to pay for my off-campus housing since my academic scholarship did not cover room and board for an infant, I struggled in silence, too proud to seek advice. In many ways, still a child myself, I didn’t want anyone’s pity, so I struggled in silence and floundered my senior year. I left without completing my history degree. During this time, I did not speak but I journaled, and writing gave me the courage to plan a path that would lead me closer to my most secret dream. I wanted to write, really write, and work with those who loved reading and writing, too. So I took a train to New York City and an unpaid internship at Ballantine Books, working at the popular science fiction bookstore, Forbidden Planet, when I was not writing jacket copy, taking copyediting classes, and learning all that I could about the publishing industry.Slowly I began tentatively circling the genre that had seemed so disappointing and closed to me as a teen reader, but I soon joined Random House’s wonderful editorial program and saw the legacy of some of the field’s most beloved pioneers. As I began this new journey, I remembered those early college experiences that had shaped me. For it was whenI was an undergraduate when I rediscovered that “sense of wonder” inherent in speculative fiction that had once lifted me as a child.

I first discovered Octavia E. Butler's work in college, when a Victorian scholar assigned her novel, Kindred, in a course exploring representations of slavery in literature. As you can imagine, the legacy of slavery looms large in the Delta, particularly in my hometown of Memphis and the Mid-South, where re-examining this era in American history is practically a local pastime. But in our first class discussions we chose our words carefully and treated history as a flat, abstract voiceless thing, tiptoeing around verbal minefields in a place where everyone claimed they’d marched with King, and the ghosts of the Civil Rights era still hovered in the air around us.

Octavia's novel about Dana's journey through time and history exposed our façade of indifference and electrified our class. A dear friend then gave me one of my favorite works by Octavia, Wild Seed, making me a Butler fan for life. I never imagined then that I would later have an opportunity to review her work, Parable of the Talents for The Washington Post Book World, or that I would be blessed to meet her and experience her wisdom and humor as a studentin 1999 at Clarion West, a six-week Seattle writers’ workshop. Butler’s novels and stories are visionary and startling, and at times, horrific, but always skillfully written, and full of surprising insights—the mark of a gifted storyteller.

Butler’s body of work inspires me, but there are many others within and beyond the field who challenge me as well. The sheer range of Neil Gaiman, Howard Waldrop, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, and Angela Carter, perhaps my favorite short story writer of all, makes me marvel and re-read their work for instruction and for pleasure.I admire the fascinating psychology of Toni Morrison’s, Nalo Hopkinson’s, and Stephen King’s characters, and recognize that like comedy, the best horror is about timing, pacing, and understanding a people’s psychology. Often what makes us laugh is as revealing is as what fuels our fears. I also admire Catherine Asaro, Greg Bear, Gwyneth Jones, and Nancy Kress for caring enough about characterization in their early “hard science fiction” works, showing me that one doesn’t have to sacrifice people for plot. The elegant storytelling of A. S. Byatt and the revisionist mythology and edginess of Jeannette Winter and Luke Sutherland make me want to reach and reach again. The faith in humanity’s ability to face the impossible within themselves, fostering communal change, as dramatized in the various works of Ursula Le Guin, Arthur Flowers,Charles de Lint, and Andrea Hairston, give me hope. Cormac McCarthy’s sometimes harrowing, often mesmerizing, spare visions of everyday moments also inspire me, and his writing is right up there in my heart with that of Alice Walker, Chris Abani, Gayle Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Ben Okri. The epic,historical shifts in the works of Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau are also literary influences, and I love the quiet humor and richness of detail in some of Charles Johnson’s and Richard Bausch’s works.

All of these writers have touched me, and each time I read them they remind me that my journey continues. I have more work to do to grow and tell the stories I most want to tell in this world, in ways that engage and inspire readers. If language is the measure of our lives, as Toni Morrison has suggested, then I want to do all that I can as a writer and a thinker to get the language of my storytelling just right.

Sheree Renée Thomas's Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the release of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories and Poems by Sheree Renée Thomas as Volume 28 in the Conversation Pieces Series.

In this first collection of the stories and poetry of Sheree Renée Thomas, memory is the only force strong enough to counter the terrors of a scarred and forgetful world.

Thomas’s characters are people scraping by in slave quarters and institutional margins, people in search of freedom and transformation who come face to face with apocalyptic powers. Thrown back on their wits and their lore, they turn to unexpected sources to make sense of things: to girl-children, old women, old skills, old magic, and forgotten ties of kinship with the natural world. Rooted in the Mississippi Delta, Thomas’s language is the stuff of life and the struggle to call things by their true names. It reaches through time in search of the transformation that will allow us to survive diaspora with memory and soul intact. These shotgun lullabies puncture the walls between us and our past, the people and their birthright.


You can purchase Shotgun Lullabies now through Aqueduct Press's website.

Sheree Renée Thomas on Strange Horizons

Check this out: Jenn Brisset interviews Sheree Renée Thomas for Strange Horizons. Sheree talks about black science fiction and her creation and development of the Dark Matter anthology series.