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How to pronounce Kij Johnson: kidg JOHN-son
Kij Johnson is a writer of short stories, novels and occasional other things. Her first sale was in 1987 to a small Minnesota magazine, Tales of the Unanticipated; since then she has sold more than fifty shorter works of fiction, as well as poems, nonfiction, and game materials. Her books include The Fox Woman (Tor, 1999); Fudoki (Tor, 2003, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award); the short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees (Small Beer Press, 2012, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award); The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor.com, 2016, winner of the World Fantasy Award); and The River Bank, a sequel to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (Small Beer Press, 2017). There was also a Star Trek: The Next Generation book with bestseller Greg Cox, Dragon's Honor.
She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (2010, 2011, and 2012), and the World Fantasy Award (2009, 2017, and 2019), and a winner of the Hugo Award (2012), as well as winning the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (2017), the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (1992); the Crawford Award (1999); and others. Her short stories include the award-winners "Fox Magic," "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss," "Spar," "Ponies," "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," and "The Privilege of the Happy Ending." She's been translated into seventeen languages, and her work has been optioned for Hollywood twice.
In the past, she's had all the cool jobs: managing editor for Tor Books, Collections and Graphic Novels Editor for Dark Horse Comics, Continuity Director and Creative Director for various worlds at Wizards of the Coast/TSR, a subject matter expert for Microsoft, and a manager for user educations groups in several tech companies.
Currently, she lives in Lawrence Kansas with a cat, Jurat.
Kij Johnson's website
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Even now, every story I write is a conscious craft experiment, whatever else
it is. It was very early in my fiction-writing life that I realized the kinds of
stories I wanted to write would happen only if I forced myself past the
margins of what I thought I already knew how to do, what I think of as my
glibnesses. Even at the beginning I knew I loved vocabulary and lyricism,
and I had intuitively developed an understanding of the uses for scenic and
narrative writing. I also had a lot of experience with interiority and feelings because of all that bad poetry and journalling in high school and college. It seemed evident that if I worked hard on just those things, I could within a
year or two write publishable — maybe even popular! — fiction that was
atmospheric and full of feels. I also could tell that this would get boring for
me — I had read plenty of author notes from writers, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Fredric Brown and others, who grew to hate their comfortable niches.
As a child I had read obsessively in a lot of adult genres. I loved SF
and fantasy, but I read a lot more mysteries and romances, and then there
was horror, biographies, history, the classics, science. I didn 't always
...
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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