Jessica Amanda Salmonson (born January 6, 1950[1][2]) is an American author and editor of fantasy and horror fiction and poetry. She lives on Puget Sound with her partner, artist and editor Rhonda Boothe.
Writing career
Fiction
Salmonson is the author of the Tomoe Gozen trilogy, a fantasy version of the tale of the historical female samurai Tomoe Gozen. Her other novels are The Swordswoman, Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman, an Asian fantasy, and a modern horror novel, Anthony Shriek.[3]
Her short story collections include A Silver Thread of Madness; Mystic Women; John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarreling Through My Head; The Deep Museum: Ghost Stories of a Melancholic; and The Dark Tales. Poetry collections include Horn of Tara and The Ghost Garden.[3]
Salmonson has written a number of nonfiction books. Notable is The Encyclopedia of Amazons, an exhaustive alphabetical reference book of worldwide history and legends about women warriors.[5] Other works of nonfiction include Wisewomen and Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore (1992) (coedited with Jules Remedios Faye), and Miniature Vegetables (1994).[1]
In addition to the books noted, she contributed a number of essays, primarily concerning gender and feminism in science fiction, to fanzines in the 1970s.
Editor
Salmonson began her editorial career in 1973 editing the small-press magazine The Literary Magazine of Fantasy & Terror[1] (under the name Amos Salmonson).[6][7] She continued as editor (under her name Jessica Amanda Salmonson) when magazine was revived under the shortened name Fantasy and Terror in 1984, and continued until the final issue in 1996. At the same time, she served as editor of Fantasy Macabre from 1985 to 1996. The magazine was subtitled "Beauty plus strangeness equals terror."[3]
Salmonson was the editor of the anthologies Amazons! and Amazons II; Heroic Visions and Heroic Visions II; Tales by Moonlight and Tales by Moonlight II; and What Did Miss Darrington See: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Stories.[3][1]
Mister Monkey and Other Sumerian Fables (Seattle: Tabula Rasa Press, 1995; Duck's-foot Tree Productions e-book, 2011)
Twenty-one Epic Novels (Seattle: Tabula Rasa, 2002)
The Dark Tales (Wales: Sarob Press 1991)
Strange Miniatures from a Northwest Studio (Bremerton: Duck's-foot Tree Productions, 2001)
The Deep Museum: Ghost Stories of a Melancholic (British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press 2003)
The Complete Weird Epistles of Penelope Pettiweather, Ghost Hunter (Alchemy Press, UK, 2016)
Poetry
The Black Crusader and Other Poems of Horror (Springfield, MO: W. D. Firestone, 1979)
On the Shores of Eternity (Seattle: Duck's-Foot Tree Productions 1981)
Feigned Death and Other Sorceries (Seattle: Duck's-Foot Tree, 1983)
Innocent of Evil: Poems in Prose(Madison, WI: Dream House, 1984)
The Ghost Garden (Liverpool: Dark Dreams Press, 1988)
Sorceries and Sorrows: Early Poems (Polk City, IA: Chris Drumm Books, 1992)
Songs of the Maenads (Seattle Duck's-Foot Tree and the Street of Crocodiles, 1992)
Wisewomen and Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore (1992) (with Jules Remedios Faye)
The Horn of Tara (Seattle: Duck's-Foot Tree, 1995; Duck's-foot Tree Productions e-book, 2011)
Lake of the Devil (Seattle: Duck's-Foot Tree, 1995)
The Death Sonnets and Others (UK: Rainfall Books, 2015)
Pets Given in Evidence of Old English Witchcraft and Other Bewitched Beings (Minneapolis: Sidecar Preservation Society, 2016)
Daisy Zoo and Other Punk-Ass Nonsense (Bremerton: Duck's-foot Tree Productions, 2016)
Non-fiction
The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era (NY: Paragon House, 1991, ISBN1-55778-420-5; Anchor Doubleday, 1992; Open Road Media, 2015)
^Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Modern Era, (1991), Universal Sales & Marketing; First Edition: ISBN1557784205 Paperback: ISBN0385423667
