How Do Speculative Fiction Writers Get Grants? A Panel.

Join our panelists for a discussion of what sort of grants are available for speculative fiction writers, what goes into a grant application, and what tips the panelists have for making sure your application has the best chance possible at success.

Panelists (bios below): Mary Anne Mohanraj, Raina J. León, Nina Woodruff-Walker, and Setsu Uzumé.

This session will take place through Zoom videoconferencing. The link will be available closer to the session itself.

Mary Anne Mohanraj: Mary Anne is author of A Feast of Serendib, Bodies in Motion, The Stars Change, and twelve other titles. Other recent publications include stories for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, Perennial: A Garden Romance (Tincture), stories at Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, and an essay in Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies. Mary Anne founded the Hugo-nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning speculative literature magazine Strange Horizons, and serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit (desilit.org) and the Speculative Literature Foundation (speclit.org). She is Clinical Associate Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. www.maryannemohanraj.com

Nina Woodruff-Walker: An Oakland native and the Museum of Children's Art's (MOCHA) Executive Director, Nina became a “MOCHA kid” in 1989. When OUSD removed art programming from the school curriculum, MOCHA became an art-making space and welcoming refuge during her teenage years. Nina is a poet who loves visual arts and understands the value of providing a platform for children to express, create, and teach. During her master’s seminars at CSUEB, Nina studied Afrofuturism; she spearheaded an Afrofuturist exhibition and curriculum at MOCHA in 2020. Nina is scheduled to submit her master’s thesis, a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Framing of White Terrorism, to CSUEB in the fall. Her motto is, "Ideas are only great when we have the courage to give birth to them."

Setsu Uzumé: Setsu Uzumé is the assistant editor and host of PodCastle, and a newly-minted game writer. Their short fiction can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cast of Wonders, and Grimdark Magazine. More at setsuuzume.com.

Raina J. León: Raina is a PhD is a Black and Afro-Boricua Philadelphian (living for many years in the Chochenyo Ohlone territory of Berkeley). She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Macondo. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. Raina is as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank.