All the Birds in the Sky

I'm the author of All the Birds in the Sky, and the forthcoming The City in the Middle of the Night. Plus a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others, and a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke.

I’m probably the only person to have become a fictional character in a Star Trek novel and in one of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City books.

I used to write for a site called io9.com, and now I write for various places here and there.

I won the Emperor Norton Award, for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.” I've also won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a William H. Crawford Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Award, a Locus Award and a Lambda Literary Award.

I have published a ton of short fiction – way over 100 short stories at this point. I’ve stopped counting. My stories have appeared in Wired Magazine, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, 3 AM Magazine, Flurb.net, Monkey Bicycle, Pindeldyboz, Instant City, Broken Pencil, and in tons and tons of anthologies. One year, I was in one of the Year’s Best SF anthologies and in Best Lesbian Erotica at the same time.

I organize Writers With Drinks, which is a monthly reading series here in San Francisco that mashes up a ton of different genres. Every month, I make up weird fictional bios for the readers and performers, and nobody’s sued yet. Readers/performers at Writers With Drinks have included the aforementioned Armistead Maupin, plus Mary Gaitskill, Amy Tan, Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, Dorothy Allison, W. Kamau Bell, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Karen Joy Fowler, Maureen McHugh and just countless others. The SF Chronicle did a really nice article about Writers With Drinks.

Back in 2007, Annalee Newitz and I put out a book of first-person stories by female geeks called She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology and Other Nerdy Stuff. There was a lot of resistance to doing this book, because nobody believed there was a market for writing about female geeks. Also, Annalee and I put out a print magazine called other, which was about pop culture, politics and general weirdness, aimed at people who don’t fit into other categories. To raise money for other magazine, we put on events like a Ballerina Pie Fight – which is just what it sounds like – and a sexy show in a hair salon where people took off their clothes while getting their hair cut.

I used to live in a Buddhist nunnery, when I was a teenager. I love to do karaoke. I eat way too much spicy food. I hug trees and pat stone lions for luck. I talk to myself way too much when I’m working on a story.