A graduate of the 2002 Viable Paradise writing workshop,[10][11] Jemisin has published short stories and novels. She was a member of the Boston-area writing group BRAWLers,[12] and as of 2010 was a member of Altered Fluid, a speculative fiction critique group.[12] In 2009 and 2010, Jemisin's short story "Non-Zero Probabilities" was a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo Best Short Story Awards.[13]
During her delivery of the Guest of Honour speech at the 2013 Continuum in Australia, Jemisin pointed out that 10% of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) membership voted for alt-right writer Theodore Beale, known as Vox Day, in his bid for the SFWA presidential position, stating that silence about Beale's views was the same as enabling them.[18] Canadian writer Amal El-Mohtar characterized Beale's response to Jemisin as "an appallingly racist screed".[19] A link to his comments was tweeted on the SFWA Authors Twitter feed, and Beale was subsequently expelled from the organization after a unanimous vote by the SFWA Board.[20]
Jemisin was a co-Guest of Honor of the 2014 WisConscience fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin.[21] At that time, GQ described her as having "a day job as a counseling psychologist."[22] She was the Author Guest of Honor at Arisia 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts.[23] In January 2016, Jemisin started writing "Otherworldly", a bimonthly column for The New York Times.[24] In May 2016, Jemisin mounted a Patreon campaign which raised sufficient funding to allow her to quit her job as a counseling psychologist and focus full-time on her writing.[25]
Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season was published in 2015, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category.[26] The sequels in the trilogy, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2017[27] and 2018,[28] respectively, making Jemisin the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy.[4] In 2017, Bustle called Jemisin "the sci-fi writer every woman needs to be reading".[29]
With Mac Walters, Jemisin co-authored the 2017 book Mass Effect: Andromeda Initiation, the second in a book series based on the video game Mass Effect: Andromeda.[30] Jemisin published a short story collection, How Long 'til Black Future Month? in November 2018.[31] It contains stories written from 2004 to 2017 and four new works. Far Sector, a twelve-issue limited series comic written by Jemisin with art by Jamal Campbell, began publication in 2019. It was nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series.[32]
Jemisin's urban fantasy novel The City We Became was published in March 2020. In October 2020, Jemisin was announced as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant.[7] In June 2021, Sony's TriStar Pictures won the rights to adapt The Broken Earth trilogy in a seven-figure deal with Jemisin adapting the novels for the screen herself.[33] In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[34]The World We Make, a sequel to Jemisin's 2020 novel, was released in November 2022.
Personal life
Jemisin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.[35] She is first cousin once removed to stand-up comic and television host W. Kamau Bell.[36][37]
Awards and honors
W
Won
N
Nominated
Novels
In 2022, Kirkus Reviews named The World We Make one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of the year.[38]
A novella entitled The Awakened Kingdom set as a sequel to the Inheritance Trilogy was released along with an omnibus of the trilogy on December 9, 2014.[49]
A "triptych" entitled Shades in Shadow was released on July 28, 2015. It contained three short stories, including a prequel to the trilogy.[50]
The short story "The City Born Great", released in 2016, is a precursor to the series and was adapted to serve as the prologue for The City We Became.
Short stories
"L'Alchimista", published in Scattered, Covered, Smothered, Two Cranes Press, 2004. Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 18th collection. Also available as an Escape Pod episode.[53]
"Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows", Ideomancer, 2004.
"Cloud Dragon Skies", Strange Horizons, 2005. Also an Escape Pod episode
^ ab"N.K. Jemisin: Rites of Passage". Locus. August 18, 2010. She studied psychology at Tulane in New Orleans, and went to grad school to study counseling at the University of Maryland-College Park.
^Stone, Elizabeth, ed. (May 26, 2013). "Announcing WisCon 38's Guests of Honor: Hiromi Goto and N.K. Jemisin". A Momentary Taste of WisCon. No. 4. p. 2.
^Rivera, Joshua (November 28, 2018). "N.K. Jemisin Is Trying to Keep the World From Ending". GQ. Retrieved March 27, 2020. But there were those in the speculative fiction community who still didn't want her, or anyone like her—a black woman born in Iowa City and raised between Mobile, Alabama and Brooklyn, New York with a day job as a counseling psychologist— to have a seat at the same table as them.
.jpg)
