Southeastern USA Special: Announcing Our Co-Editors!

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By: Sheree Renée Thomas

April 16, 2018

I am excited and honored to welcome not one but two talented co-editors who will be working with me on the guest-edited Southeastern USA special issue of Strange Horizons. These writers are both rooted in the South and gifted with a keen eye and passion for works that move imaginations and fill readers with a sense of wonder. With editorial experience in the speculative fiction field as well as an organizing background in the literary community, these writers will bring great insight and care to our work at hand—to find great stories and poems from black, indigenous, and other writers of color from the Southeast for you to enjoy. Having these two on this journey is a great gift, as our goal with this opportunity is to help support new visionary editorial voices in the field.

Remember that our call for submissions for this Special Issue is open until the end of May. Please send us your work!

With that said, please meet my co-editors, Rasha Abdulhadi and Erin Roberts!

Rasha Abdulhadi

Image by Dina Abdulhadi, 2017

As a queer Palestinian Southerner and a geek for science both fiction and fact, my writing and visual arts practices are always trying to bridge the amnesiac or nostalgic erasure of the past with our lived realities and brightest longings. Those stories from our queer, trans, indigenous, black, latinx, muslim, migrant, disabled, and otherways embattled fam can read like science fiction sometimes. I am honored, amazed, and so hella motivated to co-edit a special issue of Strange Horizons with Sheree Renée Thomas, an editor with planetary impact and one of my guiding stars. In the answers to this call, I look forward to seeing stories that are rough around the edges but whose heart shines, stories from folx who are taking risks to re-imagine the fabric of their lives and visions and redefine a Southern speculative imaginary. (Find me at sinnerscreek.com and @rashaabdulhadi)

Erin Roberts

I’m thrilled to be a guest co-editor for this special issue of Strange Horizons. I wouldn’t be the writer or person I am today without my family’s roots in Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida, or the years I spent coming of age in Washington, DC. In recent years, I’ve honed my skills as a reader and writer at the Odyssey Writing Workshop and Stonecoast MFA program, built my editorial muscles as an Associate Editor for Escape Pod and Pseudopod, and seen my own stories, including some Southeastern-flavored pieces, published in Clarkesworld, The Dark, and PodCastle (for more about me, find me at writingwonder.com or on Twitter at @nirele). I am excited and honored to now have the opportunity to learn from and work with Sheree Renée Thomas to help edit an issue of a magazine I deeply admire. I look forward to reading some amazing work and shining a much-deserved light on Southeastern writers of color.

About Sheree Renée Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas creates art inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and the genius culture of the Mississippi Delta. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 26, 2020) is her first fiction collection. Two multigenre/hybrid fiction and poetry collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and Shotgun Lullabies were published by Aqueduct Press. She edited the Dark Matter volumes (World Fantasy Award 2001, 2005) that first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction, and she was the first black author to be honored with the World Fantasy Award since its inception in 1975. Her work is widely anthologized and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received honorable mention in the Year's Best volumes. A Cave Canem Fellow, her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times and other publications. She serves as the Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (Illinois State University, Normal). She lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Find her on Instagram/Facebook @shereereneethomas and on Twitter @blackpotmojo.

Rasha Abdulhadi

Erin Roberts

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