Celebrate 2024 SFWA Infinity Award Recipient Tanith Lee
Afterword by Ann VanderMeer. Foreword by Tanith's widower, John Kaiine.
Edited by Julie C. Day with Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney.
Discounts for Early Backers.
Kickstarter rewards include signed books and art prints, story critiques, and even a Tuckerization, along with recommendations by our authors of their favorite Tanith books!
Our Project
With eight invited authors and an open call for at least six more after the Kickstarter successfully funds, Storyteller is a celebration of Tanith Lee’s work–and an object lesson in the breadth of authors she influenced. In the planning stages for over a year, this is a passion project for the press, the editors, and the authors involved.
Why Now?
As we close in on the 10th anniversary of her passing, let’s mark the date with a celebration of all things Tanith!
Tanith Lee (September 19, 1947 — May 24, 2015)
Though she wrote nearly 90 novels, Tanith Lee was also a master of short fiction. The thematic range of her work—from pulp to adventure stories, to science fiction, to gothic, and finally, to queer fiction—astounds as much as the volume of work—over 300 separate pieces. Tanith Lee’s influence on contemporary fiction is an often-hidden strand of DNA that connects writers of fantasy, science fiction, romance, horror, and YA. N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, Holly Black, C.S.E. Cooney, China Miéville, Theodora Goss, Jo Walton, and Terri Windling are just a few of the authors who cite Tanith Lee as deeply influential to their own work, and yet many readers are unfamiliar with both Tanith’s creative influence and her fiction.
In Progress Table of Contents
Terri Windling
Terri Windling is a writer, editor, artist, and folklorist specializing in myth and fantasy. She has published over forty books, receiving ten World Fantasy Awards (including the Life Achievement Award in 2022), plus the Mythopoeic, Bram Stoker, and SFWA Solstice Awards. She has edited fantasy fiction since the 1980s, working with many of the major writers in the field, and co-edited the Years Best Fantasy & Horror anthologies with Ellen Datlow for sixteen years. She also writes fiction for adults and children (The Wood Wife, The Color of Angels, A Midsummer Night’s Faery Tale, etc.), and nonfiction on folklore, fairy tales, and myth. She delivered the fourth annual Tolkien Lecture at Oxford University (2016); has been involved with the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow since its founding in 2020; was on the Advisory Board for a major exhibition on fantasy at the British Library in London (2023 - 2024); and will be a Guest of Honour at the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow (2024). A former New Yorker, she now now lives in a village full of artists in Devon, England.
Martha Wells
A winner of Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, and a Dragon Award, this author's work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the BSFA Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, the Sunday Times Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List.
Nisi Shawl
Nisi Shawl (they/them) is the multiple award-winning author, co-author, and editor of more than a dozen books of speculative fiction and related nonfiction, including the standard text on diverse representation, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. A prolific writer of short stories, Shawl’s best known long-form fiction is the Nebula Award finalist novel Everfair. Recent books include their short story collection Our Fruiting Bodies and the middle grade historical fantasy novel Speculation. Editing credits include the anthology New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, the sequel to the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. They’ve spoken at Duke University, Spelman College, Sarah Lawrence College, and many other institutions, and they teach online and in-person courses on respectful representation, dialogue and dialect, culturally inclusive worldbuilding, and diverse narrative voices. For over two decades they have served on the boards of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in fantastic literature.
Theodora Goss
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States, where she completed a PhD in English literature. She is the World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequels European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (2019). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University. Visit her at theodoragoss.com.
Maya Deane
Maya Deane is the author of Wrath Goddess Sing (Morrow), which inspired some very popular Achilles genderswap fanfiction by an obscure Ionian poet named Homer. Follow her everywhere @mayadeanewriter, and be sure to buy Wrath Goddess Sing before it’s a modern classic, like Homer did.
C.S.E. Cooney
C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author: most recently for her novel Saint Death’s Daughter, and for her collection Bone Swans, Stories. Other work includes The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, and Desdemona and the Deep. As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, as well as short fiction for podcasts such as Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tales to Terrify, and Podcastle. Her plays have been performed in several countries; most recently, in March 2023, she produced her collaborative sci-fi musical, Ballads from a Distant Star, at New York City’s Arts on Site. (Find her other music at Bandcamp under Brimstone Rhine.) Her short fiction and poetry can be found in many specfic magazines and anthologies, most recently: “A Minnow or Perhaps a Colossal Squid,” in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Fantasy Volume 1, “Snowed In,” in Bridge To Elsewhere, and “Megaton Comics Proudly Presents: Cap and Mia, Episode One: “Captain Comeback Saves the Day!” in The Sunday Morning Transport--all collaborations with her husband, writer and game-designer Carlos Hernandez. Cooney and Hernandez (collectively, "the Hernandooneys") co-designed the table-top roleplaying game Negocios Infernales, forthcoming from Outland Entertainment in 2024.
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Alaya Dawn Johnson is an award-winning short story writer and the author of eight novels for adults and young adults. Her most recent is the YA science fiction novel, The Library of Broken Worlds, published by Scholastic. Her most recent novel for adults, Trouble the Saints, won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for best novel. Her debut short story collection, Reconstruction, was an Ignyte Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. Her debut YA novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and the follow-up Love Is the Drug was awarded the Andre Norton Nebula Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, most notably the title story in The Memory Librarian, in collaboration with Janelle Monáe. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan is a writer, teacher, journalist and connoisseur of weirdness. His honors include a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, three World Fantasy Awards, and awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Science Fiction Research Association. His latest collection is An Agent of Utopia, from Small Beer Press; he narrates nine stories on the Recorded Books audio edition. His ongoing non-fiction project Weird Western Maryland has a new home page at https://www.frostburg.edu/personal-arduncan/. A former board member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, he lives in Maryland’s mountains as a tenured writing professor at Frostburg State University.
6+ Additional Authors
We'll be holding an open call for at least six more stories once the Kickstarter funds. All authors will be asked to include a statement explaining their connection to Tanith Lee's work. We're excited to discover who shows up at our virtual door!
Celebrate Tanith Lee
Afterword by Ann VanderMeer. Foreword by Tanith's widower, John Kaiine.
Edited by Julie C. Day with Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney.
Discounts for Early Backers.
Kickstarter rewards include signed books and art prints, story critiques, and even a Tuckerization, along with recommendations by our authors of their favorite Tanith books!