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by Jason Collins

Read by Jeremy Zentner

“There is more profit made from [book] commerce than from all other merchandise,” in Timbuktu, as observed by Leo Africanus in 1526. This was not simply poetic exaggeration from the famous traveler. For centuries, the Malian city stood at the very heart of an expansive intellectual network across the Sahara where scholars traded in written knowledge. These manuscripts imported into Mali’s libraries can expand what speculative fiction imagines and how we build those worlds.

What Type of Text Is in the Timbuktu Manuscripts?

The manuscripts themselves cover an extraordinary range of subjects, including astronomical charts, medical treatises, legal commentaries, theological debates, and collections of poetry and proverbs. When viewed as a collective, they reveal a city where science, faith, and art were inseparable.

Page from the Timbuktu Manuscripts – Wikimedia Commons

We also know that at its height, Timbuktu’s scholars filled private libraries with manuscripts bound in goatskins and debated theology beneath the mud-brick walls of the Sankore Mosque complex, which functioned as an Islamic learning center. Over 27,000 of these handwritten works, some dating back to the 13th century, have survived the passage of time. Scholars safeguarded the manuscripts for centuries from theft and loss during colonial expansion. Recently, these manuscripts survived thanks to the efforts of families who risked their lives to hide them from extremist attacks.

What the Manuscripts Offer: A Different Intellectual Heritage

Today, writers in the science fiction and fantasy genre should thank all those who worked to preserve the great works of Timbuktu, as many of these West African manuscripts could be the blueprints for new imaginative tales.

These manuscripts reveal that African civilizations were theorizing law, cosmology, and ethics concurrently with European traditions. They also depict worlds where spirituality and science coexisted rather than collided and where libraries served as political and moral centers of society. 

Drawing from Timbuktu’s archives is to engage with an alternative intellectual lineage that redefines what “ancient knowledge” might look like in speculative fiction. The desert city was built on scholarship, where the true currency was knowledge and where literacy was a civic duty and a spiritual pursuit. With Timbuktu’s manuscripts, a talented speculative writer can build societies that think, argue, and evolve on their own terms, not according to what’s already well established in the genre.

Non-Eurocentric Inspirations for Worldbuilding

By leaning on Timbuktu’s knowledge, a writer could create an expansive society that bucks the norm, where might is not reliant on a sword, and a book of star maps is as prized as the business end of a blade. Where scholars wield influence through their mastery of astronomy and jurisprudence. Writers could go so far as to replace knights and castles with mathematicians and libraries who strive for a just cause, shifting the emotional center of a story from conquest to inquiry. 

The manuscripts themselves suggest near-endless narrative possibilities that reach beyond how a world could look. They feature astronomical treatises that map lunar cycles, medical texts with herbal remedies, and legal and ethical writings. This could guide a writer to imagine a world in which priests measure destiny through planetary alignments, healers blend faith and science with a touch of magic, or a civilization develops a justice system that is as complex as their speculative world. The opportunities are endless.

Contemporary Echoes in Afrofuturism and Fantasy

With Timbuktu manuscripts, writers have the tools they need to craft unique stories. But this is not to say that no one has ventured into the realm of Timbuktu lore for their inspiration. In fact, there are a few famous works that draw from this diverse tapestry of knowledge.

For example, The Black Pages, a novella by Nnedi Okorafor, is one of the best examples of an author using Timbuktu manuscripts and ethos in their modern stories. This gripping novella centers on a protagonist who is on an important mission to save an ancient library in Timbuktu, which is under attack by jihadists. This parallels the true events in which extremists threatened Mali, leading librarian Abdel Kader Haidara in 2013 to smuggle out thousands of manuscripts by donkey, cart, and canoe, under the cover of darkness.

Another excellent example of creatives drawing on the lore of Timbuktu is Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King. This comic adaptation, and its broader Afrofuturist worldbuilding, hints that Mali and Timbuktu are part of Wakanda’s heritage. A great alt-history for worldbuilding in comics.

An older example is the 1960s novels The Best Ye Breed and Blackman’s Burden, written by Mack Reynolds. These science fiction novels were set in North Africa and reference Timbuktu.

There are many other speculative worlds with African flair that imply lost scholarship and legendary libraries, even if they don’t name Timbuktu directly. 

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation

It’s also important to know that when studying Timbuktu’s manuscripts, seeking inspiration from the knowledge gleaned teaches a subtler lesson about worldbuilding. It teaches coherence because every manuscript, even when theological, is grounded in a worldview in which the sacred and the rational intertwine.

Through this strategy, writers can design belief systems that make sense within their invented universes—and avoid the kind of flat cultural borrowing in which non-Western ideas are often used for visual flavor. That’s why, when writers draw on Timbuktu manuscripts, they must remember that these systems of knowledge are living ecologies. They feature histories of logic, lineage, and debate built into them, so a writer’s imaginary world must bear this in mind for the story to remain believable.

To avoid misrepresentation, it is important for a writer to be carefully curious and well learned by reading translations, listening to scholars, crediting influences, and acknowledging when they are an outsider. Science fiction and fantasy writers should go in with the mindset of treating Timbuktu’s manuscripts with reverence and intellectual partnership to guide the spirit of creation itself.

Timbuktu’s manuscripts endure as uncontested proof that civilizations are measured not only by what they build but by what they choose to remember. If we have learnt anything by looking into Timbuktu’s grand history, it’s that to create is to preserve, and to preserve is to imagine anew.

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Jason Collins is a Las Vegas–based freelance writer whose work explores how big ideas ripple through individual lives. His writing often moves between human experience and cultural imagination, tracing the ways people adapt, create, and dream within changing worlds. Whether covering real-world stories or cultural phenomena, Jason approaches each piece with a storyteller’s curiosity and a journalist’s precision.

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by Corrine Kumar

Read by Liz J. Bradley

Until this summer, I thought I had my writing process down to a science—my perfect desk setup, music playlist, iced coffee, phone away and on Do Not Disturb. However, when I sat down to work on a novel I’d taken a break from, I found myself stuck, hit by writer’s block. When none of my usual tools and strategies worked, I decided to ditch my perfectly curated setup and try something new. I hopped on my treadmill and started dictating my novel into my phone instead. And, remarkably, this was just what I needed. At the time, I thought of this as a last-ditch strategy to overcome writer’s block. Now, however, writing while walking has become a core part of my writing practice and has had a tremendous impact on my writing craft and process.

Increased Creativity

When I’m in the brainstorming phase of a project, I get my best ideas while walking. If I get stuck on a scene, chapter, or section of my manuscript, everything always seems clearer when I get back to my desk after a run. While I’ve observed this anecdotally, a 2014 Stanford University study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition has shown similar findings in the lab. In their study, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,” researchers Opezzo and Schwartz found that participants who walked on treadmills, walked outdoors, or were pushed in wheelchairs scored higher on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test (which assesses creative and divergent thinking) afterwards. These results—though not found in relation to writing specifically—suggest that writing while walking might help us come up with creative solutions to narrative problems and figure out what comes next.

Increased Immersion

While I initially thought adding the extra component of walking to my process would break my immersion in the story, I have found the opposite. Walking actually helps me visualize my settings, improve my dialogue, and get into my characters’ heads. Since I’m not staring at the words on my screen, I can better picture the settings my characters are in and see them in my mind with greater detail. Because I’m saying my characters’ thoughts and dialogue out loud, I get a better feel for their personalities, word choice, sentence structure, and emotions.

Turning Off Your Internal Editor

The “internal editor” is something that plagues many of us throughout our writing careers. It keeps us staring at the blank page, deleting sentences as we write them, and tweaking the same paragraph for an hour. However, when I’m dictating and walking on my treadmill, I find this voice is strangely quiet. This is, in part, because I don’t look at the words while I’m dictating, and thus, my internal editor can’t analyze and pick my sentences apart. The combination of walking, generating ideas, and dictating keeps my brain occupied enough that it can’t find a way to edit as I go.

Increasing Physical Activity

Physical activity has so many benefits for our physical and mental health. Numerous studies have shown that exercise leads to enhanced cardiovascular health, sleep, bone strength, creativity, self-esteem, balance, memory, cognitive flexibility, attention, problem-solving, and overall sense of well-being. Improvement in all these areas not only results in better overall health, but it can have a positive impact on our writing as well. However, in our busy schedules, trying to fit in both writing and physical activity amongst everything else can be challenging. By dictating while walking, we can combine these two activities and better integrate them into our daily lives.

Feeling the Flow

Reaching a creative flow state is something I crave as a writer. Those writing sessions where hours pass without me realizing it, words flood the page, and it feels as though the story is writing itself. I’ve tried many tricks over the years to reach this flow state—the right writing setup, great music, a unique writing ritual—but none of these methods have worked as well for me as writing in motion. While I don’t get to the flow state every time I use the treadmill, I find I reach it more frequently.

Decreased Distractions

Though having your phone in your hand to dictate might sound like the perfect recipe for distraction, I’ve found the opposite in practice. Because I’m so focused on generating ideas, walking, and dictating, my mind is too busy to wander. Too busy to watch another cute koala reel on Instagram, see what friends are up to on Facebook, or refresh my e-mail. Because my mind is occupied and I can only have one program open on my screen at a time, I’m less likely to fall down a research rabbit hole mid-writing session. When I get to a point in the scene where I need more information, I’m forced to dictate a placeholder rather than spend an hour researching how a character might repair an internal combustion engine.

Increased Inspiration

While most of my writing is done on a treadmill, I do also take my craft outdoors. When I write outside, whether I’m in an exciting, new location or in my neighborhood, I find infinite ideas for my settings. For example, seeing the variety of colors in the fall leaves on my usual route sparked an idea for a world where the magic system changes with the seasons. Outdoors, I’m also naturally forced to experience the world with more of my senses—to pay attention to more than just what I see. Hearing hawks calling to each other, feeling the oppressive heat of the humid 90-plus-degree summer, and smelling the blooming wildflowers remind me to use a variety of sensory details in my scenes.

Getting Started

As with all new strategies, writing while walking does have a learning curve. Speaking the words aloud can feel strange and awkward, getting used to your software’s quirks can be frustrating, and editing mis-dictated words afterwards takes time. However, with practice and patience (and a little time devoted to setting up), this method increases my enjoyment of writing, improves my productivity, and feels just as natural as typing at my desk. As you’re getting started, walking at slow speeds, using all safety features of your treadmill such as handrails and safety keys, setting your phone on the treadmill’s console, and walking in outdoor areas you are familiar with can all be ways to ease into this new method. 

Whether you use this strategy as a core part of your process, as a weekend treat, or as a way to just mix things up to get over writer’s block, writing while walking can be an incredible addition to your creative practice.

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Corrine Kumar is a science fiction and fantasy writer with a love of martial arts, cooking, and learning languages. Her greatest writing influences are Brandon Sanderson, Fonda Lee, Pierce Brown, and Christopher Ruocchio. She is an alumnus of the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop, and her articles “Active Reading to Step Up Your Writing,” “It’s All About Momentum: Writing Effectively and Productively Amidst a Busy Life,” and “Characterization and Worldbuilding Through Fight Scenes” were previously published by The SFWA Blog. Corrine can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.

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Rosemary Edghill (June 1956–07 April 2026), also writing as, eluki bes shahar and James Mallory, was a prolific novelist, short story writer, comic writer, and essayist. She is known for her genre-spanning work, writing both alone and collaboratively. Mad Maudlin, her third Bedlam’s Bard collaboration, was a 2002 Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA) selection as one of the best Horror and Fantasy novels of the year.

Starting as a comic book and then a regency romance writer, Edghill debuted in science fiction and fantasy writer with the space opera Hellflower series, and continued to write across genres and media, collaborating with several of the bestselling women authors of the day. Dozens of her short stories were published, and dozens of collaborations of varying length, along with her own novels, including the Bast series, and the Twelve Treasures. Edghill continued writing and collaborating through the mid 2010s.

Edghill loved collaborative writing as a way to explore both another writer’s mind and the multitude of interpretations different people find in the same phrasing of language. She enjoyed her experiences at conventions, meeting and talking with other writers, and especially loved her English Toy Spaniels.

Rosemary Edghill lived 69 years.

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Ian Watson (20 April 1943–13 April 2026) was an innovative and highly prolific novelist, poet, and short story writer. Watson’s 1973 novel The Embedding won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was also a Nebula Award Finalist, along with the 1985 novelette “Slow Birds.” Watson was also a Hugo Award Finalist for “Slow Birds” and “The Very Slow Time Machine.” Watson’s 1975 novel The Jonah Kit won the BSFA Award, and in 2024, Watson was named European Science Fiction Grandmaster by the European Science Fiction Society.

Watson served as the SFWA Overseas Regional Director in the early 2000s, and he was the long-time European Editor for the SFWA Bulletin, where he also handled the regional shipping of copies. Born in England and settling in Spain, Watson was often a featured guest at European book and science-fiction conventions and events.

Focused on thought, perception, and transcendence, with a detailed eye to control of information in pursuit of power, Watson wrote, explored, and taught over the course of six decades. Watson wrote over 200 short stories, including 11 short story collections, alongside dozens of novels. While best known for his science fiction, Watson enjoyed innovation across genres, including satire, erotica, thriller, and horror. His works were translated into a large variety of European languages, and the translation of The Embedding, L’Enchâssement, won the Prix Apollo in 1975.

Watson, along with Michael Bishop, achieved the first noted transatlantic science-fiction novel collaboration, Under Heaven’s Bridge, via mailed, typewritten manuscripts. In 1990, Watson was the first novelist for the Warhammer 40,000 wargame setting, and he is a credited writer, in a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, for the Steven Spielberg’s 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Ian Watson lived 82 years.

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Joseph Lee Green (14 January 1931–20 February 2026) was a prolific science-fiction writer. A charter member of SFWA in 1965, he was the Nebula Conference Toastmaster in 1970, and served as co-Director of the South/Central Region from 1976 to 1978.

A missile base construction worker and later communications writer for the US Space Program, Green also wrote prolific fiction on topics of extraterrestrial life and technology, including genetic modification. Green also wrote for non-fiction articles for Analog Science Fiction and Fact between 1967 and 1972. Around 80 of his short stories were published over the course of nearly 60 years, along with eight novels. His earlier novels include 1971’s Gold the Man (published in the US as The Mind Behind the Eye), and he returned to novels in the late 2010s, including with a supernatural murder series. Green’s novelette “The Decision Makers” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1965.

Author Robert Silverberg remembers:

“I met Joe Green at the 1961 Worldcon in Seattle. My career was well established by then, but Joe was just starting to think about doing some writing, and asked me a lot of questions about the commercial aspects of writing for a living.  I helped him as much as I could, and was pleased to see his name turning up on the contents pages of the s-f magazines not long afterward. A good many stories and some novels followed over the years, an impressive body of skillfully done work. Wisely, though, he looked upon writing as a sideline – very few of us have been able to make a go of it as a full-time proposition — and as his primary activity he put in 37 years as an engineer with NASA, serving to turn science-fiction into reality. When such writers as Robert A, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gordon Dickson came to the Kennedy Space Center to see the launch of moon rockets, Joe, who lived nearby, was their genial host.  I enjoyed a friendship with him of more than sixty years and his passing leaves yet another big absence for me.”

Joseph Green lived 95 years. 

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Lee Martindale (1949–10 March 2026) was a multi-genre fantasy writer, editor, anthologist, essayist, advocate, Named Bard, ordained minister, and friend to many.

Martindale served for two three-year terms on the SFWA Board of Directors, where she authored and was a fierce advocate for SFWA’s Accessibility Guidelines. She served on the Grievance Committee as a liaison to membership, and also as the SFWA Ombudsman. She received the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award in 2019.

Martindale was a passionate writer her whole life, yet it wasn’t until her forties when she first sold a published short story, “YearBride,” the first of around three dozen short stories published over the next quarter of a century. Martindale’s writing danced through speculative realms, centered in fantastical sword and sorcery—and never stayed its hand from exploring love, marriage, and sex. Determined to defy harmful standards for women in sword and sorcery, she was proud of stories such as 1998’s “Neighborhood Watch,” which introduced a “fat, feisty, and toothsome heroine into SF&F.” Martindale also wrote essays on her experiences and advocacy work, in her own Rump Parliament Magazine, her The Bard’s Fire blog, and in the 2012 article “The Good Guest Primer” for the SFWA Bulletin, edited by Jean Rabe.

Martindale’s anthologies and collections were of particular and groundbreaking importance to women in genre. Her 2000 anthology, Such A Pretty Face: Tales of Power and Abundance, centered fat protagonists, enabling a new welcome to many women to see themselves in the stories they loved. And her 2011 anthology, The Ladies of Trade Town, featured sex workers as protagonists in speculative stories. The continued notability of these collections speaks to Martindale’s insight and impact. She published a collection of her essays in 2008, and one of her short stories in 2014, under her own imprint, HarpHaven Publishing.

Lee was a member of the “SFWA Musketeers,” a self-proclaimed troupe of SFF women authors, all members of SFWA, almost all of whom were skilled fencers. Rumor speaks of some men as auxiliaries. Lee fenced from her “battle chariot” (motorized wheelchair), delighting doubters and the familiar alike with her victories (and losses) during convention demos.

Former SFWA President Cat Rambo says, “Lee was sharp and funny and unafraid. She spoke her mind and I am so sad never to be able to talk with her again in this life.”

Writer and Musketeer Elizabeth Moon recalls, “I knew Lee Martindale for years both in SFWA, and outside it; as a personal friend who, with her husband George, enlivened many a Thanksgiving feast and birthday party at our place. Lee enjoyed visiting with my horses and they enjoyed her, until Rags was a Bad Bad Pony and bit her once. She was a lively, interesting, fun guest to have around the big table. And as most of you know, a fierce advocate for many causes. I’m sure whatever post-life location her soul ended up is enjoying her now. I certainly did.”

Writer and Musketeer Melanie Fletcher notes, “If you looked up ‘force of nature’ in the dictionary, you’d see Lee’s picture. She was a brilliant writer and editor, a fierce champion and activist, and the most loyal friend anyone could ask for. She was also my treasured sword sister as one of the SFWA Musketeers. One of the most ‘Lee’ moments I can remember was when she received an angry letter from someone she’d turned down for an anthology threatening physical violence. Her reply: ‘I have two things to say to you: ‘Smith & Wesson’ and ‘Come ahead, sucker.’’ The next letter she received from the individual (yes, he wrote back) was exquisitely polite.”

Writer and Queen of the Musketeers (not a fencer, as it was not considered wise to hand her sharp, pointy things) Esther Friesner remembers, “I don’t know when we first met but I’m so glad that we did. She was talented, no-nonsense, gifted and able to speak frankly without using ‘honesty’ as a shield for speaking cruelly. She knew how to choose her battles and was never one to retreat from what needed to be done or what needed to be said. She was always fun to hang out with. As the Musketeer’s Queen I took to calling her ‘ma barde,’ and bard she was. It’s very hard accepting that ma barde has gone ahead. It is a comfort to know that even so, her music and her voice remain.”

Lee Martindale lived 76 years.

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Jeffrey A. Carver (25 August 1949–06 February 2026) was a prolific and beloved novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher, and creator of science fiction worlds, such as The Chaos Chronicles and the Star Rigger Universe. Carver wrote over a dozen novels and two short fiction collections. His novel Eternity’s End was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2001. Carver received the Helicon Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.

In service to SFWA, Carver first took on the role of Nebula Awards Committee Chair and then as SFWA Awards Rules Committee Chair for more than 25 years, starting in July 1998.

Carver directly and unabashedly loved science fiction. His childhood wonder at the expanse of space led him to find that same inspiration in writing, in literature as exploration. Carver wrote of possibilities, hoping readers would take that insight and question the world around them, of what possibilities it could hold. Carver took his passion also to teaching, with the educational series Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.

Author Robert J. Sawyer reflects:

“Jeff Carver was an absolute gentleman. Although at that point, we’d only ever met online, when he heard I was coming to his home state to do a signing, he invited my wife and me to stay overnight at his home. He was also one of the few authors willing to share hard numbers with others; he believed the more we all collectively knew, the better off everyone would be. We were friends for thirty years, and I will miss him for the rest of my life.”

Jeffrey A. Carver lived 76 years.

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by Michael Capobianco

Read by Robert Greenberger

Giving democratically chosen awards for writing isn’t easy. When the authors themselves are designing the process, there is additional pressure to make the process “fair.” It was even tougher before the Internet, when nominations and updates had to be mailed. In what was then called Science Fiction Writers of America, a small group of dedicated volunteers carried most of that burden. They were the Nebula Awards Report (NAR) Editors. 

Creation of the Nebula Awards was suggested by SFWA’s first Secretary-Treasurer, Lloyd Biggle, Jr., as a way to collect the contents of an annual award anthology that would help fund the nascent organization as well as promote the best science fiction. Founder and then-SFWA President Damon Knight ran with the idea, and the Nebula Awards were born. Modeling them from various sources, including the decade-old Hugo Awards, the awards would be voted on by the Active and Associate Members of SFWA. The first vote would be for works published in 1965 and there would be a Nebula Awards Banquet in Spring 1966.  From the very beginning, the process involved the publication of nominees submitted by members. The first set of Nebula rules was published in the September 1965SFWA Bulletin and included:

“6. All SFWA members in good standing, whether active or associate, may nominate and vote on stories and novels. Stories and novels may also be nominated, but not voted on, by the editors and publishers who originally published them. Such nominations will be accepted from one representative of each publishing firm.”

“7. Nominations will be published, and ballots distributed to members, in the November 1965 issue of the Bulletin. If three or fewer nominations are received for any story or novel, the names of those making the nominations will be listed in the Bulletin.”

A 1965 nomination ballot for short story, “novelet,” and novella was mailed with the November 1965 SFWA Bulletin. Nominations for novel would continue until December 30. These ballots were to be returned to a law firm for unbiased counting. Time was tight. Final votes would happen in February 1966 and the Nebula Awards Banquet was scheduled for March 11. (Read more about the inaugural ceremony in “A Brief History of SFWA: The First Nebula Awards” by Michael Capobianco.)  

Page 1 of Nebula Awards Report Volume 3, Number 5, Copyright (c) 1975 SFWA.

The January issue contained the first recommendations for 1966 along with a request from President Damon Knight:

“Members are asked to drop the Bulletin a postcard whenever they read an outstanding science fiction story or novel. If this procedure is confirmed when we vote on it in March, it will become part of the SFWA Awards nominating system; even if not, I think it will be a valuable service to members.”

Knight primed the pump with the first nominations for 1966, for “Apology to Inky” by Robert M. Green, Jr. (F&SF) and “An Ornament to His Profession” by Charles L. Harness (Analog). 

The winners for 1965 were announced in the April 1966 issue (which included coverage and photos from the New York and Los Angeles Nebula Banquets) and, importantly, the first list of new Nebula nominations for the year 1966. It included nine recommendations from four members: six by James H. Schmitz, two by James Blish, and one each by Greg Benford and John Brunner. The June 1966 issue contained six recommendations; August’s had 20 nominations, several with more than one nominator; September’s had 11 and November’s 11. At this time, SFWA had approximately 200 members.

For whatever reason, the Final Ballot for 1966 was underpopulated, with only three candidates each for novel, novella, and short story. Knight’s two recommendations made the final ballot but didn’t win. James H. Schmitz’s nominee for best novel, The Last Castle by Jack Vance, made the ballot and won. (For more on the Nebulas’ physical look, read “Planets and Plastic: A History of the SFWA Trophies and Awards” by Michael Armstrong.)

From this distance, if the process was supposed to let members know of worthy prospects, it looks pretty shaky. No listings for the 1967 Nebulas were published until the August 1967 Bulletin, which included a more formal listing of nominees by category and had 20 entries. October had 30, and December another 18. Nominating was catching on. In 1968, the rules were revised and regularized, with, significantly, the addition of Rule 4.(c):  

“Any title receiving a total of three (3) or more nominations will be considered to qualify for placement on the Ballot in its appropriate category. Any title with fewer than three (3) nominations will be disqualified.”

Now a single recommendation wasn’t enough, and so recommendation counting became a group pastime.

Page 2 of Nebula Awards Report Volume 3, Number 5, Copyright (c) 1975 SFWA.

The last full list of Nebula recommendations in the SFWA Bulletin appeared in issue 41/42 in July 1972. It was accompanied by a note saying that Vonda N. McIntyre was now assisting Hal Clement in preparing the list. 

Then the crystal ball grows hazy. SFWA has a complete run of Bulletins, but it’s missing some issues of its other publications from this time. The next time we encounter the NAR is the September 1974 issue of the SFWA Forum. Vonda N. McIntyre is the editor and nominations go to her. She has created a distinctive heading and the contents are well-organized. This basic format (see photos) will persist right to the end of the NAR in 2008. 

This stand-alone NAR is among the most ephemeral of SFWA’s publications. None of the original paper copies have survived in SFWA’s archives. Frank Catalano, who edited the NAR in the early ’80s, tells what it was like to edit and mail it.

“What I remember the most was the physical challenge of actually getting the report out the door. I will qualify this by stating my memory of the details of the process, 40+ years ago, may be flawed. But I recollect that Nebula recommendations would come in on postcard, mostly, some by letter. They’d be tallied and organized, and then printed on multiple sheets of letter-sized paper, folded in half, stapled, labelled, stamped and mailed. Among those who’d show up for these mailing parties at my apartment were Vonda N. McIntyre and, I think, Greg Bear. (…) What I remember the most was just the camaraderie and conversation. The need to get it right. And all of the damp sponges required to attach the stamps.”

Seven SFWA volunteers have been given the Kevin. O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award because of their work on the NAR: Chuq Von Rospach (NAR Editor 1989–1996), Brook and Julia West (NAR Editors 1989–2008), and Vonda N. McIntyre (NAR Editor 1972–1976). Other members who have taken a turn: C. L. Grant, George W. Proctor, Frank Catalano, Elizabeth Waters, Orson Scott Card, and Mark Van Name.

So, why did the NAR end? Rule changes made the Nebula more and more cumbersome to administer, and the awards were no longer tied to a specific year. Former SFWA President and current SFWA Operations Manager Russell Davis offers this summary: “The Nebula Award rules when I took office in 2008 were extraordinarily convoluted.” In 2009, the nomination process  changed to the simpler one still in place in 2026.

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Michael Capobianco is co-author, with William Barton, of the SF books Iris, Alpha Centauri, Fellow Traveler, and White Light. He has published two solo science fiction novels, Burster and Purlieu as well as short fiction. Capobianco was President of SFWA from 1996 to 1998 and again in 2007–2008. He currently serves as SFWA’s Authors Coalition Commissioner, Chair of SFWA’s Contracts Committee, Co-chair of SFWA’s Legal Affairs and Estates-Legacy Committees, and is a member of SFWA’s History Committee.

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by Melynda Hill-Teter

Read by Liz J. Bradley

Every first draft begins with words on a page and a plan. As a writer, I tracked story ideas, outlined plots, sketched scenes, developed characters, and logged worldbuilding details. But I reached a point where ideas and notes needed structure.

I wanted uninterrupted blocks of two to three hours a day at my laptop to make writing progress, but this mindset backfired, leading to procrastination. Writing ideas clicked into place, but I couldn’t find the time to write for a few hours a day.

Between work and long train commutes, I set out to build a consistent writing routine. That’s when I realized voice typing—or dictation—could help me start an outline or first draft. Basically, it’s talking into an app on a mobile device or computer and letting speech-to-text create your draft.

How Dictation Programs Work

Although language models have been around since the 1980s, the adoption of deep learning algorithms for speech recognition has dramatically improved performance over the past 15 years. Speech-to-text programs use deep learning models, training datasets, and artificial intelligence to convert spoken language to text. Over time, they adapt to each speaker’s voice, including accent, tone, pace, and preferred vocabulary.

Google Docs Voice Typing uses Google’s speech recognition AI, which is integrated with Google Workspace applications. Microsoft Dictate is built on Azure’s AI-powered speech engine and allows for dictation across Microsoft applications. Other options include Otter.ai, which converts speech into transcription, and Dragon Dictate, the first consumer speech-recognition software that allows users to dictate documents and emails and create individual voice profiles. 

When choosing dictation tools, consider if the language model can adapt to your speaking style over time to improve accuracy, support regional accents, correct misheard words by voice or keyboard, and handle noisy environments or crosstalk.

Dictation apps use editing phrases: predefined voice commands that the app recognizes as instructions for modifying text. Editing phrases include: “add comment” to add a blank comment; “delete” to remove the last word; “new line”; “start list”; “em dash”; “new paragraph”; “comma”; “period”; “question mark”; “apostrophe”; and more.

These apps pause to capture audio before transcribing several words at once. The resulting draft often requires cleanup and formatting.

My Dictation Process

I use Word Dictation and Google Docs on my iPhone, but there are many note-taking options, such as Evernote, Notion, Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, Obsidian, and Apple Notes.

Working in a quiet location minimizes the background noise picked up by a microphone. When commuting, I sit in a quiet section of the train, away from energized voices, which helps me feel less self-conscious when dictating in public. I speak directly into my iPhone to ensure clear audio capture. There are good options, such as Apple AirPods or wireless earbuds, if you don’t want to hold your device in your hand while dictating. And some people like to walk while dictating, since sitting may feel static. 

On my iPhone, I turn on Do Not Disturb to silence notifications and calls before I begin. Dictating an outline is the first step to capturing my ideas. I then auto-save the draft to the cloud and fix a few misheard words by using the on-screen keyboard. I make sure to email the outline to myself as a backup. After the dictation session, I edit the cloud copy on my laptop to develop the next version.

I block off time on my calendar for writing while commuting and on weekend afternoons. Using Google Calendar, I schedule writing tasks for specific dates and times, such as outlining, to-do items, and next steps. At the end of the week, I revisit the calendar items to verify that I accomplished each task.

Workflow for Word Mobile Dictation

Estimated setup time: 15 minutes.

Purchase a Microsoft 365 personal license, then install and sign into the Word Mobile and OneDrive apps on your phone. This feature converts speech to text, requiring a microphone and a reliable internet connection.

To get started, open Word and tap the Create button, then tap the blue plus button to open a blank document. Tap the microphone icon at the bottom-right corner to start dictating.

To apply a heading style, place your cursor at the end of the heading, tap the three dots on the bottom toolbar, tap Styles, tap the heading you want to apply, such as Heading 1.

To clear formatting, place the cursor at the end of the line where you want to remove the formatting (such as a Heading style) and say “select that” and “clear formatting.”

To save time punctuating while in a live document with the microphone enabled, tap the gear button (bottom-left corner) and enable Auto Punctuation.

To auto-save your draft in OneDrive, tap More Options and enable AutoSave or Save. 

If you accidentally close Word during a dictation session, you can find your draft by tapping Browse at the bottom-right corner of the Home screen, then Recovered Drafts.

Workflow for Google Docs Voice Typing

Estimated setup time: 15 minutes. Note: Google Docs uses the term voice typing instead of dictation.

Install the Google Docs Mobile and Google Drive apps on your phone. Your draft will be automatically saved in Google Drive once you sign into both apps.

To get started, open Google Docs and tap the bottom-right plus button to open a blank document. Tap New Document and name your document, and tap Create. To begin voice typing, tap the microphone icon on the on-screen keyboard.

To bold a word, touch and hold the word, tap Select > Bold on the formatting toolbar. To apply heading styles, touch and hold the heading, tap Select > Font (top-right corner). Under the Text group, tap the right arrow next to Styles, and select your heading.

To clear document formatting, touch and hold the word, tap Select > Font > Text > Clear Formatting.

To restore previous versions, go to Google Drive on a computer and open the document, then go to File > Version History > See Version History and select a version to restore.

Experiment with Your Process

This process might not work for everyone. Some people feel uncomfortable dictating, especially in public. Still, I found that dictating and editing helped move ideas out of my head and into an outline, a draft, and then a story. The key is to stay curious and keep experimenting until you discover what works best for your writing process.

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Melynda Hill-Teter holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and a Certificate in Technical Writing. She is a freelance writer with 20+ years of experience as an IT analyst, specializing in user support and Microsoft applications. Melynda is currently writing her debut novel, inspired by her grandfather’s intriguing claim that he invented FM radio and built a 1923 alpha radio set—one said to receive transmissions from the future.

The post Talk to Write: Advance to a Completed Draft Using Dictation appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Celebrating Roger Zelazny, SFWA’s Infinity Award Recipient for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Francisco, CA – April 15, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is pleased to announce that the SFWA Infinity Award will be presented this year to Roger Zelazny at the 61st Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 6, 2026.

The SFWA Infinity Award was created to highlight the life and work of creators who achieved a distinct and tremendous legacy in science fiction and fantasy. Although they are no longer with us to celebrate this honor, these writers helped to lay the foundation for today’s science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. Their memory abides not only in the works they published, but also in the worlds they inspired fellow and future writers to dream up in their wake.

SFWA President Kate Ristau reflects fondly on the power of Zelazny’s worlds:

“One of my first deep dives into science fiction was the Chronicles of Amber. Zelazny drew me right into the story with his world-building and world-breaking. Characters could manipulate their reality, walking between worlds, and they didn’t always make the decisions you wanted. There were heartbreaking moments and series-wide challenges that were epic and unforgettable; they lingered with you. Zelazny’s impact lingers on with us, shaping how we think about multiverses and how we create characters that are complicated, nuanced, and sometimes deeply flawed. I am honored to present him with this year’s Infinity Award.”

Challenges of a Multiverse

Roger Zelazny entered our genre’s publishing record in 1962, the same year as Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin, and the era of his ascension as a writer was marked by heated debates about the nature of science fiction and fantasy. Some called the work that he and his peers published “New Wave”, a term bound up in contemporaneous social criticism about the uptick in experimental and more “worldly” art, film, literature, and music.

This catch-all term was used in a positive light by some, to suggest a transformation in the genre: a coming-of-age for SFF as a thoroughly “literary” form, featuring more comfortable and slipstream uses of science-fictional and fantastical tropes to tell more nuanced human stories. It was also used in a negative light by some critics, to cast aspersions on SFF writers who played too poetically with language, “wrote back” against ancient myths and story structures, and wrestled with recent insights from psychology and sociology in their prose.

As for the writers themselves, including Zelazny?

Most were less interested in the labels used by critics to describe their work, and more in how to keep growing their craft – often in publishing contexts we can also learn a great deal from today.

Zelazny developed as a writer in an era when magazines were common incubators for novel-length masters of the craft. Widely read by paying customers, the major magazines of Zelazny’s day had different opportunities to curate budding and distinct voices like his.

That’s why, after publishing in magazines like Amazing and Fantastic, Zelazny was able to win a Hugo for Best Novel with what was first a serial production, delighting readers over two issues of F&SF in 1965. Zelazny’s This Immortal (first printed as “…And Call Me Conrad”) would tie for that Hugo with another patchwork publication by another SFWA Infinity Award recipient: Frank Herbert’s famed fix-up novel, Dune.

Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), nominated for a 1968 Nebula and winning the Hugo, would then entrench his distinct voice and approach to mythic world-building as a key component of mid-century SFF canon. That year, he would also support SFWA’s internal curation of canon, by editing our third-ever Nebula Award Stories anthology and providing thoughtful remarks on each tale.

Zelazny also won two Nebulas, for novelette and novella, at the very first Nebula Awards: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” (F&SF) and “He Who Shapes” (Amazing Stories). “Home is the Hangman” (Analog) won for Best Novella in 1975, and he earned many other nominations over the decades of his career.

Writers new to Zelazny’s work might be pleasantly surprised to pick up a volume today; most of his stories boast lush language and a fantastical interweaving of science-fictional conceits with allegorical and/or psychologically rich characters.

George R.R. Martin describes Zelazny as follows:

“He was a poet, first, last, always. His words sang. He was a storyteller without peer. He created worlds as colorful and exotic and memorable as any our genre has ever seen.”

Perhaps just as importantly, Zelazny operated in a community of dreamers, experimenters, and literary incubators. He was loved by many of his peers, and flourished within a network of fellow creators. To read Zelazny’s work today, and to reflect on the context in which it was written, is to remember how much the writers of SFF today share with generations of innovators come before.

The Legacy Continues

From June 3-7, SFWA is celebrating living and posthumous lights in our genre community at our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Conference prices for in-person tickets rise May 1, and Banquet tickets for the acclaimed Nebula Awards Ceremony on June 6 are in limited supply.

There, in a special presentation with our latest Grand Master, N. K. Jemisin, we’ll be learning how to build and break down worlds in our prose. With fellow Grand Master Joe Haldeman, we’ll also be exploring how the world of SFF industry has transformed over the last few decades. We will mark Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient David Langford’s contribution to genre history, and the power of our Nebula Finalist fiction to keep light alive even in an author’s absence.

And with the support of Roger Zelazny’s family, friends, and still-avid readers, we will mark this year’s worthy recipient of the SFWA Infinity Award: a writer whose worldbuilding shattered and reformed notions of SFF. Zelazny’s work forged a path for future writers to “write back” on shared mythologies, and to reimagine science-fiction and fantasy conventions with greater confidence — knowing that the gift of creating a well-told and inventive tale, irrespective of the labels outsiders assign to it, is always its own reward.

Join us for the memories, and to revel in the history and future of SFF together!

Get your tickets for the Nebula Awards Conference today

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by Angelique Fawns

Read by the author

One of the most daunting questions every author faces is: How do we get our words out into the world?

If you’re like me, you look at the careers of Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, or Kelley Armstrong and wish for that kind of success. A rabid fan base, movie and TV deals, and that most elusive of all goals: a full-time, profitable fiction writing career. But the truth is, those careers are the product of decades of hard work, timing, and luck. Most of us can’t bank on a bestseller falling from our fingers tomorrow.

So the real question becomes: What can we do right now to grow our platforms and share our writing?

I’ve been exploring different options since 2018, and after years of trial and error, I finally found the tool that works best for me: Substack. It might not be the tool for everyone, but it has provided me with an easy way to finally showcase my short stories and serial fiction. Other writers swear by Medium and Wattpad, and I’m hoping to learn more about them as I continue my writing journey.

Escaping the Gatekeepers

Like many indie authors, I wanted to find a way to share my stories without handing all my power—and my earnings—to gatekeepers. That’s not to say I don’t believe in traditional publishing (I have my first novel on sub with an agent right now, hoping to sell it to the Big Five). But if there is one refrain I’ve heard from all the successful authors I’ve interviewed, it’s that you must have multiple streams of income.

Self-publishing on Amazon seemed like a solution at first, but (for me at least) that quickly turned into a way to lose money fast. You don’t just upload your book and wait for readers to appear. It’s a screaming crowd of millions, and unless you pay the “algorithm gods” for ads, your work could sink into oblivion. 

I needed something different: a platform where I could control my own content, connect directly with readers, and not go broke while doing it. 

The Serial Fiction Route

There are other platforms that are free to distribute your work. I tried Patreon at first, and I know it works very well for others, but I was not able to get any traction on it. Like, literally, I had fewer than 20 followers. My issue was discoverability. At its heart, Substack is a newsletter provider. But it’s grown into something much bigger—a haven for writers, journalists, and creators of every kind. What I found intriguing (though it was off-putting at the start) was how writers can monetize their work right away. When I first joined, I turned on paid subscriptions almost as an afterthought. I wasn’t sure anyone would actually click that button. To my shock, people did—some simply because they liked my work and wanted to support it. That kind of generosity floored me.

Taking the Leap

I moved from Mailerlite to Substack for my newsletter when my follower base crested 1,000. (That’s when Mailerlite began charging users; they’ve recently lowered that number to 500.) There are other free platforms, such as Medium, but their email/newsletter system is tied to their ecosystem. My email list was full of names of people who weren’t Medium members.

I joined Substack in March 2024 with my thousand names. As of today, I have over 2,600 subscribers. My current content focuses on researching the short story markets and posting no-fee, paying short story calls, but I recently expanded my content into posting serial fiction. My followers aren’t as enthusiastic about my fiction as they are about my short story research, but I am hoping to find more readers who do.

Researching the markets is fun, and I feel like I’m providing a service for the community, but my goal is to be a WRITER. So, every Wednesday, I now publish a new 1,000-word chapter of my ongoing space opera, The Chronicles of Roxie Vega.

An author will never be “discovered” if their work isn’t out in the world. The best novel ever created will molder sitting on your hard drive. So far, I’ve been very happy with the response. Followers comment on the content, and the instant feedback is fabulous. I might not have tons of readers yet, but this experiment has just begun. At least I’m seeing some traction, whereas my free fiction was read by maybe one person on Patreon. My open rates on my short stories are closer to 1,500 or 2,000 on Substack.

Making It Work 

Part of what gave me the courage to try serialization was seeing other writers succeed with it. I remember watching a TED Talk by Elle Griffin, who talked about how she serialized her novel Obscurity. Though I listened to that talk almost a year before I tried my own serial fiction, I kept thinking about it. I started looking at Wattpad and Medium, but wasn’t sure how I could find an audience.

The setup phase of Substack isn’t entirely intuitive, so it took longer to get it going than I had anticipated, and the “tags” that you assign to content are nothing like hashtags on other social media. Instead, a “tag” is a way to organize content on your landing page.

As a Canadian writer, I’ve had no issues using Substack’s Stripe-based payment system, but I’ve heard from other creators who aren’t as fortunate. Stripe isn’t supported in many countries, which means international writers outside its network can’t get paid or monetize their newsletters directly.

Substack’s openness to nearly all viewpoints has also drawn criticism, especially after reports that extremist newsletters were operating on the platform. Some writers left in protest, while others see it as the price of creative freedom online. The majority of the content and interactions I’ve had on Substack have been positive and supportive, but I do respect that others may have a different opinion.

Even if I never find huge monetization with my serial experiment, the worst-case scenario is having a complete novel at the end of this process. Beyond getting our words into the world, just creating them consistently is a challenge. Committing to posting 1,000 words a week means I must (at a minimum) write those thousand words. Motivation!

Could Serial Fiction Work for You?

For me, Substack has answered many of the questions I used to struggle with. I was spending so much money trying to create a platform for myself, but making nothing. Paying for newsletter hosting, paying for podcast hosting… Now I have a platform that is free and even pays me a little. 

Another issue was visibility. How do you find followers in an oversaturated world of talented authors all hoping to capture reading eyes? Substack’s community talks freely in the “Notes” area, and I have found new writing and reading friends by commenting on the posts of others. I’ve had followers tell me that I should try Medium, and I might branch out as I get more established. I still often feel like I’m screaming into a void, but at least I know a few people can hear me now. If you are sitting on the fence about putting your words into the world, there is no time like the present. Why not try serial fiction?

Explore more articles from Writing by Other Means

Angelique Fawns is a journalist and speculative fiction writer. She began her career writing articles about naked cave dwellers in Tenerife, Canary Islands. After selling her first story to EQMM, she fell in love with weird fiction, which is ACTUALLY stranger than non-fiction. You can find her lurking at @angeliquefawns on X, blogging about upcoming calls at https://angeliquemfawns.substack.com, or gazing into the abyss, hoping it stares back at her.  Over 100 stories published. Find some in Mystery Tribune, Amazing Stories, and Space & Time.

The post Using a Newsletter Platform for Serial Fiction appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Jason P. Burnham

Read by Naching T. Kassa

Whoopsie-doodle! Your protagonist has just been written into a world where the infrastructure for antibiotic production no longer exists. Perhaps you’re writing in the near future, and climate change has progressed to the point of the complete collapse of global commerce. Perhaps the aliens from the first Independence Day movie have blown up all the major centers of production around the world. Or maybe the antibiotic production infrastructure has yet to be invented because you’re writing in the past or a pre-technological fantasy world. Wherever you’re creating, no one is making antibiotics. Protagonists living a “life after antibiotics” (or before, as may be the case) is becoming an increasingly relevant theme/scenario for modern speculative fiction. What’s a protagonist (and author looking to write such a setting with believable medical accuracy) to do?

Before we dive into what your main character’s options are for making/acquiring antibiotics, first we must consider the spectrum of conditions for which you might need antibiotics. Some common bacterial infections are those of the urinary tract, lungs (pneumonia), ears, skin and soft tissue, bones, and meninges (meningitis). Add to that diarrheal illness and sexually transmitted infections. If there are no antibiotics, what can your protagonist do for the afflicted? 

Note: We won’t cover antivirals or antifungals here. For unchecked fungus, see The Last of Us, the empty pool scene from the movie Annihilation, or various National Geographic documentaries. The immune system tends to take care of viral infections without antivirals, though some people would die without supportive care in a hospital. Unchecked HIV without an antiviral infrastructure should be its own Planetside article, but you could also just read up on what happened in the 1980s (see And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts).

Managing Infections Without Antibiotics

Control of a bacterial infection’s source is paramount, and for some infections, this can be done surgically in a way that doesn’t necessarily require any antibiotics (think of draining a boil). Unfortunately, if there aren’t any antibiotics at your protagonist’s disposal, there probably aren’t any anesthetics either (ouch!). So, if you’re the unlucky protagonist (or patient/family member/love interest of the protagonist) who has toe gangrene in this story, break out the mouth guard, the whiskey, and the sleeping incantation, as the most readily available chopping/cutting instrument is sharpened in preparation for gangrenous appendage removal. Make sure the post-operative wound is cleaned and bandaged appropriately, keeping it free of water and dirt. 

These methods (cutting instead of finding an antibiotic) could also be applied to conditions/procedures like the lancing of boils and draining of other purulent collections from festering wounds that are close enough to the skin’s surface to be reached easily with whatever tools of the trade are available in Protagonist World. Note: You’ll want to consider how people with amputated parts are going to be received by others (is this an inclusive world or an ableist dystopia?) and what assistive devices might be fashioned/DIY-ed to make sure they have a chance of outrunning the zombies or rogue AIs or plutocrats.

But what about infections where “chopping it off” isn’t an option or “draining pus” just won’t fly? After all, you can’t cut out the urinary system if it burns when you pee (though your protagonist may think that preferable given their symptoms), nor can you cut out the meninges (yes, I see you autocracy who empties skulls to implant the next-gen brain/spine implant for mind-controlled super soldiers—meninges explant is not allowed!). So, what can the protagonist do? For a urinary tract infection, the best strategy may be an ounce of prevention. Something as simple as having your protagonist drink extra water will reduce the risk of getting a urinary tract infection. “But clean water is limited.” Touché. Perhaps your protagonist has access to cranberry juice or the extracts of urine of pregnant mares to reduce UTIs. But eventually, a character (perhaps even a main one) is going to get an infection that cannot have been prevented and can’t be cut or drained away. What then?

Ancient Recipes

In the last decade, scientists have recreated a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon recipe for an anti-infective salve used for eye infections. Known as Bald’s Eyesalve, this remedy was rediscovered in Bald’s Leechbook (archived in the British Library) by a team of microbiologists and experts in Old English. The concoction involves onions, garlic, wine, and a cow’s bile salts combined in a brass vessel (talk about a witch’s brew). When applied in a lab to Staphylococcus aureus (a bacterium that causes more than a million deaths per year globally), the concoction showed excellent killing activity. The Dark Ages aren’t sounding so dark now, huh? 

Bald’s Eyesalve is just one example—perhaps your protagonist has access to other forgotten or dismissed remedies. An ancient text, only recently discovered. An Indigenous remedy known only through oral tradition, in danger of being phased out of history by colonial violence. Lost scrolls from antiquity stumbled upon in a cave, desert, or island that are previously unread, but provide crucial insights into antibiotic properties and preparations from commonly available plants, fungi, insects, or other plot/world-convenient source. It is entirely plausible! One of the first-line drugs against malaria was discovered by a Chinese researcher in the 1970s, who went through thousands of ancient texts and folk manuals to identify potential anti-malarials! Consider also that wounded Confederate soldiers from the first American Civil War were treated with Native American remedies derived from plants ranging from white oak to devil’s walking stick to tulip trees. The sources of nature-derived antibiotics are myriad in real life and can be in your fiction too.

So, where does this leave our protagonist? If the infection can plausibly be cut out/off, this may be the route to go. If an infection can be prevented, this will save much grief. For those infections that can’t be cut or prevented, an herbal/plant concoction from a plausibly arcane tome/text/scroll may just save the day (and limb)! If you want your story to be a commentary on loss, maybe the concoctions have great promise and the ancient text swears they work, but despite your protagonist’s best efforts, the loved one still dies. But if you’re going for hope, these ancient remedies are going to do just the trick!

The Aftermath

One final note: In a world without antibiotics, disabilities will arise in survivors—limb loss, deafness (meningitis is a common culprit), blindness, gait problems, and debility, among others. Accommodations for and coping among the infirm and the recovered can be powerful points in your story (if you so choose). Happy apocalypse writing!

Explore more articles from Writing from Science

Jason P. Burnham (he/him) loves to spend time with his wife and children. He dearly misses his dog. He is an infectious diseases physician and researcher.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Welcome to Our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Programming!

San Francisco, CA – April 6, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is proud to launch its preliminary program for its 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference, running from June 3-7 in Chicago, Illinois.

The Nebulas are an opportunity to celebrate SFWA’s latest finalists and their works in Chicago this June 3-7, along with SFWA’s 42nd Grand Master N. K. Jemisin, latest Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient David Langford, and current Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award recipient Gay Haldeman.

The Nebula Awards Conference is also an excellent opportunity to network with fellow writers, expand industry horizons, and pursue professional development goals in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres.

This year’s conference is packed with in-person and virtual offerings and strongly celebrates our theme of Worldbuilding & Worldbreaking. You can check out our preliminary schedule at our new programming station on SFWA.org. Full panelist complements and final modifications will be added soon.

New Merch Alert!

You can also celebrate this year’s Nebula conference theme with new items at the SFWA Store, where $25 USD from every purchase of these specialty goods goes to our Finalist Scholarship Fund.

Many of this year’s Nebula Finalists would love to celebrate their achievement in community this June in Chicago, and you can help us get them there – while snagging a great new t-shirt or notebook for longterm use. Direct donations to the fund are always welcome.

Spread the Joy in Community

A ticket to the online Nebula Conference also gets you online attendance to the 10th Annual StokerCon – completely free! At StokerCon, which runs from June 4 to 7, you can celebrate Linda D. Addison, one of this year’s inaugural Nebula Award Finalists for Best Poem, and a Guest of Honor at the 10th-anniversary event run by the Horror Writers Association.

Congratulations to our peer organization, the Horror Writers Association, on its decade of conference craft for genre writers!

Details will be sent to registrants. Enjoy two cons for the price of one!

Get to Know Some of Our Headlining Presenters!

Toastmaster Tananarive Due is not only guiding our Nebula Awards Ceremony on Saturday, June 6, but also presenting a Crash Course in Speculative Screenwriting on Saturday, with accomplished husband and creative partner Steven Barnes. This creative duo has made significant contributions to the world of speculative horror, with a focus on Black histories within the genre and the role of genre in general for the heady work of resistance and renewal.

Are you ready to deepen your thematic storytelling in multimedia forms? Join us for this enriching conversation in June!

Gay Haldeman is receiving this year’s Service Award for a career of building out SFF culture in support of her husband’s writing, including through her work with SFWA. On Thursday, June 4, we’ll be hearing from SFWA Grand Master Joe Haldeman himself, in an insightful panel titled “Historical Perspective: The Evolving World of SFF”. This conversation is a critical part of this year’s conference theme, because writers are forever building upon layers of lore that are easily lost in the shifting landscape of our industry.

Where are we reinventing the wheel? What has consistently preoccupied us in genre, and where are we forging new ground? What is uncannily similar and wildly different about the way writers have built their creative lives and careers over the decades – and where might all these historical signs be pointing us next?

Join us for an excellent panel discussion with a star writer who has embodied dedication to his ever-changing community for decades.

And on Friday? Well, that’s when Grand Master N. K. Jemisin will offer a special presentation, a Crash Course in Worldbuilding and Worldbreaking. Learn more from the master herself about how many ways our worldly expectations – of a world, a city, a culture, or a shared reality – can be spun up in readers’ heads and then brought crashing down, only to be remade in more interesting forms.

This spotlight event will lift you up and invigorate the writer in you before we head into our very special evening of star-studded celebrations. After our Nebula Finalist Reception, our Nebula Finalists and VIP Autographing event will be open to the public, and a terrific opportunity to mingle and get to know some of the brightest lights in our “Nebula” this year.

RSVP today to be added to a giveaway draw, too – so tell all your friends in Chicago and its vicinity to bring their books for signing!

Remember: Nebula Banquet Tickets Are in Limited Supply! Purchase Yours Today! WRITERS!
GET YOUR HEADSHOTS AT THE NEBULAS

We are honored this year at the Nebula Awards Conference by the repeat appearance of photographer Kaitrin Acuna, who last year made our 60th anniversary shine, and left smiles on the faces of authors who secured appointments for headshots. (Check out last year’s gallery yourself!)

This year, Kaitrin is back, and with an incredibly generous offer to help SFWA support the general SFF community. When you book an author headshot appointment with Kaitrin for a window during our conference in Chicago, 15% of the fee will go to our Givers Fund, a SFWA-driven outreach program that distributes micro-grants to SFF projects every year.

Thank you – and Kaitrin – for supporting the future of SFF at the Nebulas! Lock in your Nebula Conference Tickets today!

The post Press Release – April 6, 2026 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Celebrating David Langford, SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Recipient for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards

San Francisco, CA – March 31, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is pleased to announce that the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award will be presented this year to David Langford at the 61st Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 6, 2026.

The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is bestowed by SFWA upon a person who has made significant contributions to the community sustaining science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. The award was created in 2008, with Wilhelm named as one of the three original recipients, and it was renamed in her honor in 2016. Our latest recipient joins a storied list of winners, including Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Octavia Butler, Neil Clarke, Gardner Dozois, Joanna Russ, Stanley Schmidt, Nisi Shawl, Arley Sorg, and Sheila Williams, among many others.

How does one do justice to the work of a science-fiction creator whose wide-ranging pursuits, publications, and accolades include the long-standing and ongoing curation of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) itself?

As SFWA President Kate Ristau notes, “With his work on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Langford has not only built, supported, and challenged the field of SFF; he has literally helped to define it. His decades of work have made science fiction a richer and more inclusive field. We are more than happy to present him with the Solstice Award in recognition of his career filled with positive, focused, and uplifting contributions.”

A Pillar of Service to Community

Those decades of service to our genre have taken many forms, all necessary for a thriving ecosystem in SFF publishing. Published authors of science fiction and fantasy are made possible by avid readers, equally avid commentators, fans dedicated to the cultivation of spaces to share and discuss great work, historians and archivists marking down events in genre of note, non-fiction writers offering supplement and story-seed to all our fantastic prose, editors sharpening one and the same, and publishers painstakingly building homes for all of the above.

Langford has been all of these, and more. He has handily merited his record-holding 29 Hugo wins out of 55 nominations, among a wealth of other honors in genre. Nor has his service to our ever-expanding community reached an end; along with SFE, Langford continues to sustain Ansible, a UK newszine covering SFF events and happenstance.

Langford’s dedication isn’t just known through titles, either, but also in his tonal range. Here is a commentator who would make readers laugh on one genre outing, then inspire serious reflection with the next. For decades, Langford’s editorial work took care where care was needed with the living history of our medium. His fan-community work brought joy where joy was needed in SFF, too.

“I am delighted to celebrate David Langford as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association 2026 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient,” says SFWA Executive Director Isis Asare. “His witty sense of humor and encylopedic knowledge of speculative literature has fostered an international discourse on science fiction. The measure of Langford’s impact cannot be overstated.”

The Celebration Continues

Please join SFWA in celebrating the achievements of David Langford, and all our other special guests and Nebula finalists, this June 3-7 at our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Conference prices for in-person tickets rise May 1, and Banquet tickets for the acclaimed Nebula Awards Ceremony on June 6 are in limited supply.

Be part of our ongoing history, in a genre that dedicated community-builders like David Langford have curated for us for so long, and so well.

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by Ben Nadler

Read by Maggie Ayala

Although Abraham Lincoln’s life was cut short by a pro-Confederate terrorist in 1865, he has found continuing afterlives as a speculative fiction character trope. Over the past century, this figure has appeared in works by a range of writers, including Vachel Lindsay, George Saunders, Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling, and Tony Wolk.

Each of these works contains a different Abraham Lincoln. They are not the same character. Still, these Lincolns share a common origin, as each of their authors has found a way to use speculative fiction conceits to build their own Lincoln from historical record. What’s more, these conceits offer ways to displace Lincoln from history and bring him into contact with different times and realities. These encounters provide readers and writers of speculative fiction with new understandings of the past, present, and future of this country.  

Abraham Lincoln, 1863. Photo from the Smithsonian Institution from United States, via Wikimedia Commons Why Lincoln?

It is not incidental that Lincoln, of all US historical figures, has taken on this role. “The Great Emancipator” has long functioned as a liberatory figure in American culture. Historian Nina Silber notes that during the Great Depression, Lincoln “offered an imaginative repository” for hopeful responses to the era’s crises. He has filled a similar function for authors in the intervening decades. 

Exploring how different writers have deployed Lincoln in their fictional narratives provides an understanding of Lincoln’s enduring cultural role. At the same time, comparing uses of this character trope by very different authors also provides insight into methods available to speculative fiction writers when working with the past. In these Lincoln examples, we see how the genre devices of hauntings, robotics, and time travel can all be used to access history. 

To and From the Cemetery

In his 1914 poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” Vachel Lindsay writes: “Here at midnight, in our little town / A mourning figure walks, and will not rest.” The long-dead president, unable to sleep in his tomb, walks into downtown Springfield, Illinois. The current unfolding of World War I troubles him: “It breaks his heart that kings must murder still.”

A century later, the prominent slipstream writer George Saunders uses a similar conceit in his award-winning 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders’s Lincoln leaves the White House in 1862 to enter a Georgetown cemetery inhabited by ghosts. The most recent arrival is Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie, killed by typhoid. The grieving president visits Willie’s crypt, holding him one last time. The ghosts observe the president throughout the night. Ultimately, the spirit of a formerly-enslaved man inhabits Lincoln’s body.

President Lincoln and Family Circle. Photo from Popular Graphic Arts, via Wikimedia Commons.

A key problem that a fiction writer working with a well-known historical figure has to address is how to build an original character from historical records. Saunders has two solutions. In the cemetery chapters, the ghosts perceive Lincoln without preconceptions, such as when one observes: “An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.” In other chapters, however, Saunders leans into the textual record, montaging historical quotes (actual and fictive). For example, one chapter is constructed entirely of negative statements made about Lincoln by his contemporaries. This move plays with the tension between the historical Lincoln, the myth of Lincoln, and Saunders’s own character of Lincoln.

Your Next Stop: The Twilight Zone!

Saunders’s fiction is indebted to the uncanniness of the original Twilight Zone TV series. Bardo, in particular, recalls the 1961 episode “The Passerby”, which depicts Northern and Southern soldiers trudging home at war’s end. The protagonist is a Confederate who comes to realize—in a classic Twilight Zone twist!—that he and everyone else on the road were killed in the war. Eventually, Lincoln himself rides down the road and tells a resistant Confederate widow, “I’m dead too. I guess you might say I’m the last casualty of the Civil War.” The conflict can finally be laid to rest.

Lincoln’s Tomb, Springfield, Illinois (approximately 1879). Photo from Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

“The Passerby” aired as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining ground. Host and scriptwriter Rod Serling comments on the 20th-century end of segregation through his 19th-century characters, just as Lindsay comments on the violence of WWI through his wandering Lincoln. Because Serling’s Lincoln is a ghost who now exists outside mortal time, he can speak to audiences in different eras.

Mechanical Statesmen

Not all speculative depictions of the Abe Lincoln character rely on the supernatural. In Philip K. Dick’s 1972 novel We Can Build You (originally serialized in Amazing Stories as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum), Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, are recreated as androids by an electronic piano company. This connects to Dick’s use of androids in other works, notably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), as well as to the real-world Lincoln robot Disney debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Edwin M. Stanton. Secretary of War (between circa 1860 and circa 1865). Photo by Mathew Benjamin Brady, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dick’s near-future novel touches on issues such as housing justice, corporate power, and lunar colonization, but its primary subject is mental illness (particularly schizophrenia). This concern is embodied in the robotic Lincoln, who exhibits the president’s notorious “melancholy.” “Lincoln was this way,” argues one of the android’s engineers. “He had periods of brooding.” Like Saunders’s, Dick’s depiction of historical figures draws directly on historical record: The androids are programmed with punch-tapes of real sources, such as Carl Sandburg’s exhaustive Lincoln biography.

Fourscore and Seven Years into the Future

Rather than androids, Tony Wolk’s 2004 Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life (the first in a trilogy), uses another established sci-fi mechanism to bring Lincoln into the 20th century: time-travel. Wolk is not as well-known as Dick, but he has his own role in sci-fi history, such as co-teaching workshops with Ursula K. Le Guin.

At the beginning of Wolk’s novel, Lincoln finds himself transported in the middle of the night from 1865 Washington, D.C. to 1955 suburban Chicago. “Suddenly,” Wolk writes, “there he was, on Howard Street, reeling, as if he were perched on the edge of a cliff, peering over.” As in many time-travel novels, such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the temporal leap isn’t fully explained, but the reader follows along for the journey.

The time-travel allows Lincoln to experience a few last moments of reprieve before his assassination. It also allows him to perceive Cold War America. Early on, he tries to wrap his mind around the atomic bomb by comparing it to a Civil War battle: “He was picturing the disaster with the Petersburg mine, but now above ground and engulfing a whole city, a Philadelphia, a Boston.” 

To the Ages

As we enter new eras of American political and social life, the Lincoln trope will no doubt continue to be deployed by authors trying to make sense of our conditions. We will have to see what new Lincolns are brought to life in the decades to come. When the historical Lincoln was assassinated, Stanton famously stated, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Through his role in speculative fiction, he truly does.

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Ben Nadler is a writer working between New York City and the Philadelphia area, where he teaches English at Widener University. He is the author of The Sea Beach Line: A Novel and Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side 1981–1991. His next novel, Prairie Ashes, is forthcoming from American Buffalo Books. More at bennadler.com.

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More on the Nebulas: Past, Present, and Future Conversations

Happy Nebula Season! The celebration continues.

On March 15, 2025, it was our privilege and delight to celebrate this amazing group of new finalists. For over 60 years, the Nebulas have recognized the best in speculative fiction writing, and that tradition continues with this year’s incredible cohort, which includes writers from more forms of SFF than ever before.

First Steps in a Continuing Mission

In 1965, we started with four categories. Want to know more? Last year, Past President Michael Capobianco gave us a brief history of “The First Nebula Awards”, which gives you a sense of how far we’ve come and how exploration has been part of the process since the start.

Over time, we came to celebrate speculative fiction across more forms. Sometimes new award categories stuck, and sometimes they fell away. As our History Committee pursues interviews with past presidents and Grand Masters this year, more of SFWA’s wild and wonderful Nebula lore will be added to our archives, and we can all deepen our understanding of this dynamic industry and its shifting priorities over the decades. As the board liaison for the History Committee, I can’t wait to dive deeper into the past, contextualizing it for current and future members.

But in every season of the Nebulas, one core truth prevails: We empower creators across our industry to KEEP ON WRITING. As I said in our finalist announcement, what a joy it is to now honor poetry and comics with Nebula Awards, and to bring them into the Nebula conversation.

The Joy of New, Great Writing

Our Poetry and Comics Committees worked hard for the inclusion of these latest awards. Thank you to everyone who spearheaded this work, from the initial rules to final edits, to spreading the word about fantastic eligible works.

On SFWA.org, we’re rolling out new Nebula celebration spaces, like our Nebula Finalist Page, that will support readers and voters wanting to learn more about all the works on our ballot and the creative teams that support the writers listed there. The Nebula Award Reading Packet is now also available for voting SFWA Members, on the Action Items bar in our Membership Portal. Please remember that these materials are shared among SFWA members as a courtesy from publishers, and do not distribute any of their contents with the broader community.

Next Steps for Promising New Awards

The days of a simple flat ballot being the sum total of finalist representation are behind us.

This ballot is rich, multilayered, and diverse. We have tough decisions ahead of us as we log in to vote on our final choices. I’ve already read many of this year’s works myself, and I have been downloading the rest onto my Libby account, gathering friends to play some new games, and ordering new books and magazines from my local indie. 

Launching a new award is the beginning, not the end, of the conversation.

When the Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and our Nebula Award for Game Writing first launched, they prompted the same questions about creative teams that are now raised by members of the greater comics community. It is not always easy to differentiate the writing from other key components in these mediums – like the incredible illustrations, lettering, titles, and coloring on these works of art.

At the same time, the Nebulas are SFF writers’ “Oscars”: awards chosen not by general fans, but by fellow writers celebrating the craft they know best. These writers are at the top of their craft, and it is our honor to celebrate their works at the Nebula Awards in June.

Still, we have work to do as we continue to build the genre and the teams that make these works shine!

How the Community Is Pitching in

Along with Finalist Cards that include more creators in the overview of each work on the ballot, we are working with our Comics Committee to honor artists at the Nebula Conference in Chicago this June, while celebrating the core focus of our writing organization’s awards.

We also invite your feedback via sarc@sfwa.org to support the rules committee’s upcoming review of Nebula procedures, since we now have three multimedia awards that will benefit from more consistent standards for representation.

We heard your feedback, and we thank you for taking the time to share it. The Board meets on April 9 to select a name that better represents the award’s purpose of honoring comics writing, but we are also already united in our belief that comics – like games, and dramatic presentations – are art forms where the sum of their parts is far more than words on the page. 

While three of our comics finalists this year are written and created by authors who were also their own illustrators, creating a comic, graphic novel, or illustrated work is frequently a collaborative process. Many of the writing finalists for our inaugural Comics Nebula are part of truly spectacular teams, and we encourage you to check out what such collaborations can create.

Next Steps for Our Other Multimedia Awards

The multimedia teams involved in Games and Dramatic Presentations also raised another conversation this year.

As you know, this was our first year asking writers if they had used LLMs in the writing of their works. The resounding answer was NO (with quite a few expletives thrown in, “FUCK no!” being my favorite), but the team approach to these art forms creates a different challenge for a writers’ organization trying to promote writer-focused awards. We are still waiting to hear back from Bradbury and Game finalists on award acceptance and their responses to the LLM question. Those entries are marked as provisional on the ballot.

Our industry is changing, but the rich history of SFWA’s Nebula Awards shows that it’s always been changing. That’s why SFWA is at its best when we approach new sites of creative tension with curiosity, in community, whenever they arise. With every new award and rule change, we need to support our core mission of writer uplift, advocacy, education, and defense.

We’re so glad to be celebrating this giant leap with Poetry and Comics with you.

And we stand firm in our commitment to keep growing with the needs of our genre community.

Keep writing – and reading!

The Final Nebula Ballot closes 11:59pm PDT on April 15. Support these writers and read their work (you’ll be glad you did)!

Write on,

Kate Ristau
SFWA President

The post Press Release March 27, 2026 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Rebecca A. Demarest

Editor’s note: This article is a follow-up on the 2025 Seattle Worldcon panel “Giving and Receiving Feedback for Poets,” with panelists Dawn Vogel, F. J. Bergmann, Holly Lyn Walrath, Vanessa MacLaren-Wray and moderated by Rebecca A. Demarest.

Read by Michelle Knudsen

We’ve all been there: An acquaintance asks us to review a poem. If you’re anything like me, warning klaxons go off in the back of your head, and Admiral Ackbar screams about traps. Do you tell them what they want to hear? Are you going to be honest about how much you dislike the metaphor involving slug slime and new love? Let’s face it, poetry is an intensely personal and moderately subjective form of self-expression, which means the feedback we give (and receive) has the power to hurt.

So what do you do? Ink and run away? Take the plunge and give honest and constructive feedback? If you are brave enough to take the second option, here are some helpful tips to ensure that both of you walk away from the experience feeling satisfied.

Set Expectations

Whether you’re sitting at a workshop roundtable or your aunt has mailed you a packet of poetry about her Shih Tzu, always start by setting expectations. Ask the poet what kind of feedback they are looking for. Here are some possible questions:

• What kind of feedback are you looking for today?
• Do you want my general impression of the piece or something more detailed?
• Do you want to know how it affects me?
• Do you want feedback on the success of various techniques you used?

Once you’ve established the kind of feedback they are looking for, make sure you also know the parameters around the piece you are reading:

• Is this poem for a particular publication or event?
• Did you use a traditional form for the poem?
• Is this poem referential or in response to something?
• Do you prefer written feedback on a separate document, in-line comments, or a conversation?

All of these questions help to adjust the way in which you approach critiquing to ensure that the feedback you give will actually be helpful.

“Don’t Be This Guy.” Poem and photo by Rebecca A. Demarest.
Seriously, don’t be this guy. The comments are rude and entirely rooted in the editor’s view of what they believe should be on the page, not trying to edit for what the poet is going for. Framing Your Feedback

Once you know what aspects of the poem you are focusing on, the next step is framing your critique. Because poetry is often so personal, it is essential to frame your feedback with respect and care. If you have a long-standing relationship with the other party, you will develop a unique dynamic in which you might share feedback such as, “I’m not sure if it’s the turbulence on this flight or this stanza, but something is making me nauseous,” but outside of an established friendship, that sort of feedback is more often than not going to make someone mad.

Instead, lean in to phrasing your feedback as an opinion and/or a question:

• This metaphor didn’t work well for me. I didn’t quite understand what you were going for. What feeling are you trying to evoke?
• I lost the meter in this line; what if you switched these words around?
• With the title, I was expecting something different because of the connotations in my head for those words. What were you going for specifically?

Also note how that feedback is based on a concrete moment on the page. Specificity is a wonderful tool and should always be used when giving feedback. This is because general vibes such as “I liked it,” or “I’m not sure it’s ready,” don’t actually offer anything for a poet to address and can be frustrating. In addition, offering follow-up questions as part of the feedback can help the poet think about possible solutions to the perceived problems.

“Much More Productive.” Poem and photo by Rebecca A. Demarest.
This editor has taken into account not only the poet’s note about form but has also offered universal comments (noted in-line for helpfulness) and opinion in the form of questions. A much better (and nicer!) editor. When You Ask for Feedback

If you’re the one asking for feedback, the first thing you need to ensure is that you are in the right headspace to receive folks’ opinions. Do not ask your work-friend what they thought about your poem at the end of a long workday where you skipped lunch. You’re hangry and tired, and anything Barbara from Accounting says at this moment is likely to be frustrating.

Instead, share your work only when you can honestly say you are ready to edit the poem. Cultivate in yourself a desire to make your poems shine. This may take some effort on your part to embrace the imperfect nature of writing. First drafts are—and should be—utter rubbish with a few hidden gems. Second drafts get better, and third, but you won’t ever know if the poem is communicating what you want it to say if you haven’t at some point shared it with other people.

That raises the question of motivation. Are you writing poetry for yourself in an effort to process heavy emotions? Then you likely don’t need or want intensive critique and should tell your readers that you’re sharing not for edits but for the sole satisfaction of having another person read your work. On the flip side, are you aiming for publication in literary journals around the globe? In that case, strap in and put on a poncho; you’re in the splash zone and about to get dirty. Prepare yourself to rip that poem apart again and again with the help of your fellow poets to polish it to a mirror-bright shine.

In all of this, remember that you and your fellow poets are sharing a piece of your soul with the world. Treat each other with kindness and respect, and together we can help one another’s work reach a brilliance that a poet alone struggles to attain. And if you’d like a fun suggestion to help you feel more comfortable giving and receiving feedback on poetry, I can personally recommend bribing your non-poet friends with their favorite food or drink and then workshopping your poem. The results can be hilariously—and unexpectedly—useful.

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Rebecca A. Demarest (she/her) is an award-winning author, poet, playwright, book designer, and writing instructor living in Seattle, WA, with her husband and three muppets. Her work has appeared alongside authors like Cat Rambo, been dramatized for the stage and NPR, and her novels are available at your favorite bookstore. When not being held hostage by words, you can find her tending to her indoor jungle, crafting, sewing, playtesting tabletop role-playing games, and failing to teach her dogs new tricks. For more information on her work, please visit rebeccademarest.com or follow on BlueSky @writerlybliss‬.

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