Nisi Shawl

Shawl's first novel, Neo-Victorian, Belgian-Congo-set, steampunk story Everfair, was released in September 2016 by Tor Books, with a cover illustration by award-winning, Hong Kong artist Victo Ngai.

In 2011, their longtime work in the women's speculative fiction was recognized, when Shawl was selected as Guest of Honor at WisCon 35. In 2015, recognized as one of the "go to" teachers and mentors within the speculative fiction community on pedagogical issues of diversity, they served as guest speaker both in the "Black to the Future: An Imagination Incubator" ("Ferguson is the Future") symposium of multicultural speculative fiction artists, academics, and creative writers, at Princeton University (held on September 14, 2015) and in the "Creating Futures Rooted in Wonder" symposium of fairy tale, science fiction, and indigenous storytellers and scholars, at the University of Hawai'i (held from September 16–19, 2015), where they performed in author readings with Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and other indigenous writers, as well as led creative writing workshops.

Shawl's novel Everfair joins with the growing movement of international speculative-fiction writers of color, including editorial efforts by Jaymee Goh of Malaysia and Joyce Chng of Singapore (author-anthologists behind the 2015 collection of Southeast Asian steampunk published in English, The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia), to repurpose the science fiction trope of alternate history in critical ways that foreground issues of colonialism, globalization, and culture.

Shawl has edited several anthologies of speculative fiction, especially collections of Afrofuturist, feminist/LGBT, and African-American sf/fantasy short stories, including recent homages to pioneering black/queer sf novelists Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler: Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany (2015), co-edited with Bill Campbell, and Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2015), co-edited by Rebecca J. Holden. Shawl's anthology work has been part of their longtime participation within both the feminist and the African-American sf writing communities, evidenced in their editing of WisCon Chronicles Vol. 5: Writing and Racial Identity (2011, generated from America's most venerable feminist sf convention); as well as in their stories' publication within women sf writers' literary experiments, such as Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies (2006, by feminist sf publisher Aqueduct Press) and within African-American speculative fiction collections, notably the groundbreaking Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000).

In 2009, Shawl donated their archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

Shawl's short stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, the Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, Semiotext(e) and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Brian Charles Clark of the fiction review site, Curled Up With a Good Book, praised their debut collection, Filter House (2008) – which gathered 11 previously published and three original short fiction pieces – saying that: "Shawl’s keen sense of justice and their adamant anti-colonialism always ride just beneath the surface of their stories. Never didactic, Shawl possesses the gift of a true storyteller: the ability to let the warp and weft of plot and character do their moral work for them."

Shawl is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a 1992 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. They are a board member of Clarion West and one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society. Their stories have been shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award, and Writing the Other received special mention for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2008, they won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for Filter House, which was also shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award. In 2009 their novella Good Boy was additionally nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Their 2016 novel Everfair was nominated for a Nebula Award.

Shawl was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They started attending the Residential College of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 1971 at the age of 16, but did not graduate. They live in Seattle, Washington, where they review books for the Seattle Times as a freelance contributor. Shawl is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.

Nisi Shawl (born 1955) is an African-American writer, editor, and journalist. They are best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories who writes and teaches about how fantastic fiction might reflect real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, colonialism, physical ability, age, and other sociocultural factors.