8/25 @ 8 pm
Feminist Spec Fic night
The Liminal Center
Oakland, CA
Women have been writing speculative fiction since its invention...by a woman! Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is credited with creating the science fiction genre, and the women of scifi, horror, and fantasy haven't stopped since 1818. Perhaps we CANNOT be stopped? What unearthly power COMPELs us? Maybe coming out for this reading will help us investigate that matter...
A fantastic slate of female speculative fiction writers will be reading this night at the Liminal Center in Oakland. The Liminal Center is a creative space that fosters the artistic voices of female and female-identifying artists and writers. Our works will be available for purchase and signing after the event, and Liminal offers refreshments for donations.
Here are the truly Fantastic Five Feminists reading this night:
DANA FREDSTI is an ex B-movie actress with a background in theatrical combat (a skill she utilized in Army of Darkness as a sword-fighting Deadite and fight captain). She is the author of the Ashley Parker series, touted as Buffy meets The Walking Dead, as well as what might be the first example of zombie noir, A Man’s Gotta Eat What a Man’s Gotta Eat, first published in Mondo Zombie. She also wrote the cozy noir mystery Murder for Hire: the Peruvian Pigeon (Fox Spirit Books), is co-author of What Women Really Want in Bed, and has written several spicy genre romances under the pen name Inara LaVey. Additionally, Dana has a new urban fantasy series, Spawn of Lilith, with Titan Books, the first coming out June 2017. She also has a story coming out in V-Wars 4: Shockwaves, and a story, “Crash Course,” in the upcoming anthology Joe Ledger: Unstoppable.
She lives in San Francisco with her husband and fellow author David Fitzgerald, with whom she’s co-writing Time Shards, a science fiction trilogy for Titan Books. They share their house with their dog Pogeen, and a small horde of felines.
AUDREY T. WILLIAMS is an Oakland-based writer and an MFA Candidate in the Writing program at California College of the Arts. She is working on her first speculative fiction novel, as well as personal essays about her multi-racial family life. Audrey is a child of the '80s who grew up on the North Carolina coast near Camp LeJeune. Her fondest memories of youth include: watching Star Trek with her father and learning to make lemon pickle and mango chutney with her mother. She has been deeply exploring her cultural and racial identity formation, as well as healing via ancestral memories and spiritual gifts. (http://www.imaginingfutures.org)
REBECCA GOMEZ FARRELL conjures up short and long speculative fiction stories from her home in Oakland, CA, where she resides with her tech wizard husband and two trickster cats. Her debut epic fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, comes out August 22 from Meerkat Press. Her shorter works can be read in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the Future Fire, and Bull Spec among other magazines. She also blogs about food, drink, and travel at theGourmez.com, and yes, she has opinions about candied bacon.
L. S. JOHNSON was born in New York and now lives in Northern California, where she feeds her cats by writing book indexes. Her stories have appeared in such venues as Strange Horizons, Interzone, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, and Year's Best Weird Fiction. Vacui Magia: Stories, her first collection, won the 2nd Annual North Street Book Prize and was just nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her novella Harkworth Hall was published this summer. To find out more, visit her website at (http://traversingz.com/).
EFFIE SEIBERG is a fantasy and science fiction writer living in San Francisco. Her stories can be found in the "Women Destroy Science Fiction!" special edition of Lightspeed Magazine (winner of the 2015 British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology), Galaxy's Edge, Analog, Fireside Fiction, and PodCastle, amongst others. Her stories have been a finalist in the AnLab Awards 2016, received honorable mentions in the Year's Best YA Speculative Fiction 2015 and in Writers of the Future contest, and have been in the Tangent 2016 recommended reading list. She is a graduate of Taos Toolbox 2013, and a member of SFWA and Codex. She likes to make sculpted cakes and bad puns. Follow her at (http://effieseiberg.com/).