Sheree Renée Thomas – Special Guest
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, music, natural science, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 2020), her fiction collection, was honored as 2021 Finalist for the Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, July 2016), longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct January 2011).
She edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction anthologies, Dark Matter (Grand Central, 2000 and 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction short stories. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage, 2020). She is the Associate Editor of the historic Black arts literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & the Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 and is the Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also writes book reviews for Asimov’s.
She was recently honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Special Award – Professional category for contributions to the genre and is the Co-Host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony at DisCon III in Washington, DC with Andrea Hairston. Sheree is the Guest of Honor of Wiscon 45 and a Guest of Honor of StokerCon 2022. She is a Marvel writer and contributor to the anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland (Titan, March 2021) and collaborated with Janelle Monáe on the artist’s forthcoming fiction collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories from Dirty Computer (Harper Voyager, April 2022). Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, a new anthology she co-edited with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight is forthcoming from Tordotcom Publishing in 2022. A former New Yorker, she lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.