Nisi Shawl is an African American writer, editor, and journalist. She is best known for her science fiction and fantasy stories and novels dealing with race, gender, and sexual orientation. She lives in Seattle, where she also writes on political and cultural matters for the Seattle Times. Even before Shawl's steampunk-flavored alternate history of the Belgian Congo, Everfair, took the sci-fi world by storm, her short stories had already established her as a cutting-edge black writer whose politically charged fiction is in the grand feminist tradition of Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Joanna Russ.
Shawl's keen sense of justice and their adamant anticolonialism always ride just beneath the surface of her stories. Never didactic, Shawl possesses the gift of a true storyteller: the ability to let the warp and weft of plot and character do their moral work for them. --Brian Charles Clark in Curled Up with a Good Book A talented and distinctive voice. --Daniel Haeusser of The Skiffy and Fanty Show Nisi Shawl tells stories as if they have just awakened from a vivid and terrifying dream, and they're intent on relating its details. --Seattle Times Shawl is brilliant. --Amal el-Mohtar on NPR