Writing the Imagination
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. The author of three collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011), she serves as the dditor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and as the associate editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975. She edited the groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Hachette, 2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, that introduced W. E. B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction and garnered two World Fantasy Awards. Her work is widely anthologized, appearing most recently in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945-2010), Marvel’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, Transition, and The New York Times. Her work has been supported with fellowships and residencies from Smith College as the Lucille Geier-Lakes Writer-in-Residence, the Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of Arts, VCCA, the Wallace Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, ArtsMemphis, and others. Sheree was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre and will serve as a Special Guest and a co-host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony with Malka Older at Discon III in Washington, DC. She lives in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.