SF/F Artists of Color

In the midst of recent discussions of Fantasy art, I saw a comment or two about the paucity of people of color depicted on the covers and in the pages of prominent genre magazines. It’s true that I often see more white faces than not, and I suspect that the artists themselves are often not POC (though one major exception is Frank Wu, a Hugo award-winning artist of fabulousness).

In order to provide a helpful guide for those interested in expanding their horizons when it comes to art and artists, I invite readers to post links to the portfolios of their favorite POC artists in the comments. It’s okay if you want to link to your own work as well! At the end of this week I’ll pick some to feature in a post. And, of course, I’ll add the names and links to the CBS wiki.

I’ll start off by pointing to one of my very favorite artists: Sanjana Baijnath. If you ever visited Fantasy Magazine in the first year after our redesign and saw the fairy girl on the header, you’ve seen Sanjana’s work.

I showed you mine, now show me yours…

Short Fiction on the Wiki

You may or may not be aware that the Carl Brandon Society has a brand new wiki! This makes me particularly happy because I love wikis. I like categorizing and organizing information, and I love that the process can be democratized. There can be a lot of drama around wikis (just look at Wikipedia), but ultimately they’re a good thing.

Example: look at the short fiction I’m listing on the blog. It’s great to have it here, and hopefully when people search for multicultural or multiethnic fiction they’ll find the listings. But a wiki has a further advantage of listing and presenting the information in a straightforward, easy to find way. This page will soon be a complete record of the short fiction published by POC in 2009. It won’t be complete just because of me, though. It’ll be complete because other people will come along and add any missing information.

Here on the CBS blog I’m only focusing on 2009 short fiction. But over on the wiki there’s a page for listing 2008 short fiction. And if someone wants to, they can create 2007, 2006, 2005, etc. pages. Plus, there’s a page for listing book-length work and individual author pages.

I very much encourage POC authors to contribute to the wiki. Unlike Wikipedia it’s okay for the authors themselves to add their own information. (For now… I think. I did.) I’d love for the wiki to be one of the most comprehensive repositories for information about SF by and about people of color.

March and April Short Fiction

Here’s the data I have on POC short fiction published in magazines in March and April 2009:

March

April

Once again, if I’ve missed some stories, please let me know in the comments or by sending an email to the Gmail address: theangryblackwoman+pocfic. Also check out the list we posted last week as I’ve added some new stories. This week I’ll finish up 2009 magazines and next week I’ll post fiction found in anthologies.