Writing Ourselves into the Narrative: Maryland Sci-Fi Writers

They say “write what you know,” – even in science fiction! Join a panel of Maryland sci-fi authors as they share not just how they came to the genre but use their own lives and experiences to create diverse and inspiring alternative futures on the page.

Originally recorded on January 21, 2021.

Links and resources shared during the program:

You can read more from Aliza here – https://atgreenblatt.com/list-of-published-stories/

You can read more from Sarah here – https://sarahpinsker.com/fiction

You can read more from Jason here-https://sites.google.com/view/theblkrobotproject/home

Space Time Collapse Vol. II: Community Futurisms (story, “First Gate”), The Afrofuturist Affair – https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com/product-page/space-time-collapse-ii-community-futurisms

“The New Day Again” at Bmoreart.com: https://bmoreart.com/2016/12/the-new-day-again.html

You can read more about Rebecca’s other work here – http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/978-1-61976-037-0.php

Meet the Panelists:

Sarah Pinsker

Sarah Pinsker’s first novel, A Song For A New Day, won the 2020 Nebula Award. Her short stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the Locus, the World Fantasy Award, the Neukom Institute Book Award, the Compton Crook, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her second novel, We Are Satellites, will be published in May 2021. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth she swears will be released someday soon. She was born in New York and has lived all over the US and Canada, but currently lives with her wife and terrier in Baltimore. Her website is sarahpinsker.com.

A.T. Greenblatt

 A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has won a Nebula Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other publications.

Jason Harris

Jason Harris is a Baltimore based futurist, educator and cultural activist.  He is the founder and facilitator of the BlkRobot Project, a long term educational art effort designed to place multi-functional art of scale in predominantly Black neighborhoods.  Jason is a Kimbilio Fiction fellow whose work has appeared in Black Enterprise magazine, Catalyst Literary journal, BmoreArt.com and various online publications. He self-published the speculative fiction anthology Redlines: Baltimore 2028 in 2012, and most recently his story “First Gate” was published in the anthology Space Time Collapse Vol. II: Community Futurisms.

For five years, Jason served as the director of creative services for the Living Well Center in Baltimore, where he curated and managed projects centered around Baltimore’s indigenous community arts, diaspora arts, and alternative education projects.

Jason collaborated with Olu Butterfly and The MotherShip squad, which mounted the critically acclaimed anchor project at Artscape 2016 entitled, “The MotherShip Connection”.  He has led workshops at Goucher College, Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Baltimore and the University of the Bahamas.  Jason currently teaches coding online to students in Baltimore and Dakar, Senegal.

Rebecca Holden, moderator

Rebecca J. Holden is a fan and scholar of feminist, YA, and African American science fiction. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999 and is currently a Principal Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Holden has published essays, book chapters, and reviews on various science fiction writers and books in Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, LA Review of Books, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, and others. With Nisi Shawl, Holden co-edited and contributed to Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013).

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This live stream Zoom event is presented in relation to the special exhibit Jews in Space: Members of the Tribe in Orbit, on view September 13, 2020 through April 11, 2021.