Tag: people of color

SF POC Short Fiction Form

By:  TempestBlog Against Racism
SF POC Short Fiction Form

To make my life easier, I created a form that people can fill out to alert me of short fiction by people of color. That form will then feed into a merge thingy which is supposed to auto-generate lists for me. We’ll see.

And just so this post consists of more than one line, check out how the 2008 list of fiction is growing. Yay! 2009 has a few extra entries, too. Read the fiction available to you then head over to the CBS awards nomination form and let them know which stories or books you thnk deserve some recogniton.

Guest Blogging, Wiki-ing, and the like

By:  TempestElsewhere on the Internets
Guest Blogging, Wiki-ing, and the like

I feel like I must have mentioned this before, but looking back it seems maybe not. Anyway, this month I’ve been guest blogging at the Carl Brandon Society blog. I think this is going to become a regular thing as it seems like they’re very pleased with the lists of POC fiction I’ve been posting.

By the way, if you’re POC and have short fiction coming out in 2009, please let me know so I can include you in future lists. Instructions at this link. If you already had something come out in 2009 and missed my announcement before, you can add your story yourself to the Carl Brandon wiki. There’s also a 2008 short fiction entry.

At some point I’d like to start listing novels on the wiki. But it may take someone other than me starting that project. Though if I continue blogging at CBS, then another thing I want to start doing is mini author interviews whenever a writer of color has a book coming out. Something similar to the author spotlights I did at Fantasy Magazine. A 4 – 6 stock questions that hopefully elicit interesting answers. It’ll be a quick and easy way to start keeping a list of who’s publishing what and when. Plus, promotion!

And finally, if you will all please head over to this post about artists of color in SF/F — I’m trying to create a list. I hope it will also go up on the wiki someday. I only have two comments, sad! I know there are many artists of color out there. Please add your favorites or add yourself.

Readercon

By:  TempestEvents
Readercon

I’ll be attending Readercon in a couple of weekends and this time I’m on a bit of programming. If you’d like to find/stalk me, here’s the deets:

Friday, 3PM — VT: Interfictions 2 Group Reading
Delia Sherman (host) with Amelia Beamer, K. Tempest Bradford, Matthew Cheney, F. Brett Cox, Michael DeLuca, Jeffrey Ford, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Shira Lipkin, Rachel Pollack, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine
Readings from Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by host Sherman and Christopher Barzak and forthcoming in the fall from Small Beer Press under the auspices of the Interstitial Arts Foundation.

Friday, 5PM — Salon E: Off Color
K. Tempest Bradford, David Anthony Durham (L), Eileen Gunn, Anil Menon, Cecilia Tan
At various sf conventions, we’ve been to more than one panel during which the panelists try to figure out why there seem to be so few writers of color in the field. As an alternative, we have invited several panelists to discuss what an sf field more enticing to writers of color might look like.

Friday, 8PM — ME/ CT: Annual Interstitial Arts (IAF) Town Meeting
Ellen Kushner with discussion by Liz Gorinsky, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Shira Lipkin, Delia Sherman, John Shirley, Sarah Smith, Catherynne M. Valente
Note: I’m not officially on this but will be there talking about the auction and salons and such.
Interstitial Art falls in the interstices of recognized genres. The Interstitial Arts Foundation is a group of “Artists Without Borders” fighting the Balkanization of art. They celebrate work that crosses or straddles the borders between media, the borders between genres, the borders between “high art” and popular culture. They are not opposed to mainstream fiction or genre fiction, nor are they seeking to create a new category. They are just particularly excited by border-crossing fiction (and music and art), and want to support the creation of such works and to establish better ways of engaging with them. The IAF has had a presence at Readercon from its beginning. In 2007, in cooperation with Small Beer Press, the IAF published Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, and in fall 2009 they will present Interfictions 2, edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. They are also doing a lot with visual arts. Interstitial Arts is an idea, a conversation, not a hard-and-fast definition-and it’s a conversation you are invited to join.

Saturday, Noon — VT: Federations Group Reading
John Joseph Adams (host) with K. Tempest Bradford, Robert J. Sawyer, Allen Steele, Catherynne M. Valente,
Genevieve Valentine

Sunday, 11AM, Maine/Connecticut: The Future of Magazines, Part 2 (Online) — (part 1 is at 10AM)
K. Tempest Bradford, Neil Clarke, Robert Killheffer, Mary Robinette Kowal (L), Matthew Kressel, Sean Wallace
Are print magazines doomed? (Heck, if newspapers can’t make it …) Or will they survive in their tiny niches? Are there ways to make them more viable? Is that even worth the bother? After all, online magazines are now easy and relatively inexpensive to start — are they the answer?

Suggest some new comment avatars

By:  TempestGeekitude

Those of you who read or comment on my posts here on the site (instead of just LJ) know that WordPress assigns avatars to everyone who comments. The assignments are generally random, though after you make three comments you can choose one to be yours whenever you post.

The theme for the avatars is: POC in genre media.  TV, movies, comics, anything visual. My list is pretty comprehensive, btu I am missing some.  And every now and then people tell me so. Of course I always forget later.

So! Here’s your chance. Take a look at all of the avatars I have so far and tell me who I am missing.  Can be any genre media of any time from anywhere. Just let me know character name, show, etc. also, if you have a link to a good image, stick that in. It makes things easier on me.

WisCon and POC – Spread the Word!

By:  TempestEvents
WisCon and POC - Spread the Word!

Here are the details we’ve worked out for the unofficial POC-only events @ WisCon:

Friday:

Meet & Greet

After the opening ceremonies (approx 8:30PM) there will be an informal gathering of POC so that we can meet each other, plan how we’re going to deal with certain aspects of the POC space during the con, and squee over the # of us all in one place. At around 8:50 we’re going to depart for somewhere other than the lobby–perhaps someone’s room, a corner of the bar, a restaurant, wherever we decide. So be sure to be in the lobby before then!

Saturday:

11:45 – 1:00 PM – Intra-POC Relationships & Coalition Building Kaffeeklatsch
one of the overflow rooms on the 6th floor.

Participants of this kaffeeklatsch will be limited. (I’ll let you guess what the limitations are.) In order to avoid certain unpleasantness, there will be folks at the con with sign-up lists for this event. You’ll be able to recognize them by the buttons they wear, which will say “People Against We-Sha-Sha“. If you want to be one of the people with a sign-up list, please let me know.

(The lunch time begins at 11:15, which gives people time to hop over to the cafe to get some food if there’s nothing in the con suite they can eat. But I believe this year they are making sure there are vegetarian and vegan options.)

Monday:

8:00 – 9:45AM – POC Breakfast & Con Roundup
Concourse Hotel Restaurant

Some have suggested we have a last get-together on the last day to go over our con experiences and sketch out a plan for how we’re going to deal with some of the POC-only spaces next year. I blocked out the entire early morning programming block so that people could drop in as they wake up, pop out to attend a panel, etc.

Also, now that the programming schedule is up, is anyone willing to take shifts (during one programming block, say) so we can have a POC-only lounge space?

Now that we have a day/time, is anyone able to print out a bunch of copies of the info flier so we can hand them out?

And last, I would like to have a reading with all POC participants (though the audience can be mixed, maybe?), maybe on Saturday. Is anyone interested in reading?

Spread the word, everyone! I want as many people to know about this before the con as possible, as it will facilitate getting people in the right place at the right time.

WisCon and POC Space

By:  TempestConventions
WisCon and POC Space

I just got my final programming schedule and all of my panels are on Sunday! And now that the process is complete, it’s time to discuss the POC-only panel “Intra-POC Relationships & Coalition Building” that was first suggested in this thread. As discussed there and elsewhere, there are issues surrounding creating a POC-only space officially at WisCon. However, if we decide to hold this panel/conversation unofficially (which is what we’re doing–genius!) then that does not impact on the WisCon organization and bring up icky legal issues.

There was also an interest in having a POC-only space for folks to retire to throughout the con. Again, such a space can’t be an official WisCon thing, but, again, we’ve found a way to work it out.

The only thing left to do now is organize and set dates and times. For the panel discussion, I thought it would be a good idea to do it during the lunch break on Saturday and have people eat while it’s going on. A lunch meeting! The room will be on the 6th floor, right down the hall from the con suite, so people can pop down there, grab something to eat, and join in. However, this might not work for everyone, so I created this poll:

n

n

{democracy:2}

Next issue, the POC-only space. Again, this will happen in one of the rooms on the 6th floor during the day (i.e. before the dinner break). But in order for it to work we’ll need to have one person in the room during the times it’s available to be a doorkeeper, as it were. We don’t need to have the room available all day, certainly, because all of us want to enjoy the con. So it will, essentially, be open when there is someone there to take a shift. You probably won’t know for certain when you’d want to do a shift until the programming schedule is posted and you see which panels you want to attend, but if you’re at all interested in taking a shift, please say so in comments (and leave an email address where I can contact you!).

Other tasks that need doing:

  • Designing a flier to tell people about the panel and the POC-only space
  • Blogging about it so that people know what’s up before getting there
  • Deciding who the “panelists” (or, as I like to think of them, moderators of the group conversation) will be
  • Scoping out if people want to have other POC related conversations/panels in the space as well — maybe people from deadbro?
  • Scoping out if we want to do a POC author reading

I’m excited!

ETA: Some folks indicated Friday afternoon so in order to prepare themselves for the con ahead.  I think this is a good idea, but we should also remember some folks won’t hear about this until the con, and we don’t want to leave them out.  But if we get together for dinner Friday or have a general meet & greet, that would work, too, and have the major discussion on Saturday once we’ve had a chance to spread the word about it.