Nisi Shawl is best known for fiction dealing with gender, race, and colonialism, including the 2016 Nebula finalist novel Everfair, an alternate history of the Congo. They're also the coauthor of the Aqueduct Press Conversation Piece Writing the Other: A Practical Approach and a cofounder of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres. They have served on Clarion West's board of directors for two decades.
They edited the World Fantasy, Locus, and Ignyte award-winning anthology New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, published in 2019; a sequel, New Suns 2, was released in March 2023. Shawl co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler with Dr. Rebecca Holden. A Middle Grade historical fantasy novel, Speculation, was released February 2023 from Lee & Low. Shawl lives in Seattle, one block away from a beautiful lake full of dangerous currents and millionaires.
Filter House, Shawl's first Aqueduct Press story collection, co-won the 2008 Otherwise/James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Additional awards include the World Fantasy Award, the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award, the FIYAH Ignyte Award, two Locus Awards, and the British Fantasy Award.
Our Fruiting Bodies collects stories of old growth and fresh decay, of stubborn rebirth and the faint but nonimaginary paths connecting life and nonlife.
From the sharp, sweet confessional of their Peter Pan-inspired "Awfully Big Adventure," through the melting ambitextualities of "Just Us" — from the early, dizzy-eyed quest at the heart of "Looking for Lilith" through the newly unfurling tendrils that pierce the grounds of "I Being Young and Foolish" — Nisi Shawl's search for the power of fiction's truth puts pure, precious gifts right here, right in your hands, ripe and ready for reading.
"Nisi Shawl's Our Fruiting Bodies is a wilderness of untamed magic to explore, ever changing underfoot, beauty thorned and fertile with meaning, nurtured by the most talented of keepers. Shawl trusts their readers to be attuned to the mysteries of the imagined, rather than sated by formula or convention."
– Indrapramit Das, author of The Devourers"Another short story collection by the brilliant Nisi Shawl. Imaginative, moving, powerful, compassionate, as good as Filter House, which is high praise, because that's one of my very favourite single author collections. It's great to see someone working at the top of their craft like this. I heard that it was out at the World Fantasy opening ceremonies and bought it immediately. There's an incredible range of kinds of stories here, and they're all just so great."
– Tor.com, Jo Walton"Shawl (Everfair) creates a fantastical and sometimes unsettling tapestry with these 18 wild flights of fancy. Several of these stories call back to older tales; "Salt on the Dance Floor" and "The Tawny Bitch" have echoes of "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast," respectively, while "She Tore" follows Wendy Darling and other familiar characters through life after Neverland. Among the standouts are "Street Worm," "Queen of Dirt," and "Conversion Therapy," all about a girl named Brit who discovers that the world teems with dangerous invisible entities. Throughout the linked narratives, Brit comes quite literally into her power and helps other young Black kids like herself find their own. "Vulcanization" and "Cruel Sistah" shift the collection into horror, bringing an unsettling edge as the characters of both stories encounter ghosts that have sprung from their misdeeds. Less memorable are "Big Mama Yaga's," about an unusual architect, and the WWI-set "A Beautiful Stream," which lack the dynamism of the other tales. "Just Between Us," the mysterious and winding tale of Dolores, Little Girl, and the dead women that keep appearing in their house, ends the anthology on a strong note. Rich in diversity and imagination, this will delight any speculative fiction reader."
– Publishers Weekly"Nebula Award nominee Shawl (Everfair, 2016) presents a new collection of fantastical short fiction bound to delight speculative fiction and Afrofuturism readers."
– BooklistAn Awfully Big Adventure
I'm going first. I'm the last girl to be born, and what's left to pick by then? My oldest sister already gets to be the smart one, and the middle girl, everybody decides, must be the most imaginative. So I'm the brave one. Usually — except for being born — that means that I go first.
And this is why, if there has to be a reason. I go first. I don't have to know what I'm doing. Don't have to know how, why, where. I'm the first. I'm the brave one. This is an adventure. Like life. I'm going.
It all begins with a short stay in the hospital, barely overnight. Stress test in the morning, but all I can think about during that is where's my gold tennis charm necklace. My mom and my sister look everywhere, but it probably got stolen.
My tests don't prove nothin. The health care providers decide I've been experiencing anxiety attacks. Counseling is prescribed.
Couple years pass by. Turns out there's a growth on my left adrenal gland. The doctors plan on taking it out. My oldest sister talks about the friends she'll stay with in the town where they say they'll do the operation. Then something more urgent comes up: breast cancer.
It's early. Stage 0. Still, the providers decide they have to deal with that before anything else. They schedule my mastectomy.
Anesthesia. I tip into the dark. Like falling out of a canoe. The me I'm used to has been dry, always, crackers or toast; now everything I am is soaking wet. To the core. Melting apart.
I bob to the surface of the darkness. There's my sister. Nearby a woman sobs and cries about how she can't breathe. For an hour.
Finally I'm wheeled back to my room. There's dirt in the corners.
Blood keeps draining from my incision, fast and steady. We have to empty the plastic bag where it gathers every twenty minutes. The nurse lies to me and says my surgeon's not around. I get up to pee and drop through the surface again. Down under the light and air and feeling. Down. Then back up again to my mother, and back down, put there on purpose this time, to sew up the uncauterized capillary that has been pouring out blood to soak me and sink me.
Up. Light. Food. I'm home in time for Thanksgiving. I will even eat lima beans. Even beets. Coconut. Anything. Never going to turn away any blessings I'm given ever, ever again.
But I no longer trust the light the air the feeling. They went away before; I got no reason now to believe they're here to stay.
Another year passes. Time's trying to lull me. It does. I wear halter tops, tell lopsided jokes. But one day playing on the courts with my son I pull a muscle, I think. I lie down on the living room couch. Low to the water. Ripples of pain spread out from my back, lapping up against me. One hand hangs over the boat's side, trailing through the darkness, dipping in. I could sleep so long. I could sleep for always and still feel this tired.
I fight my way back to dry land. I go to the store. I talk on the phone with my oldest sister far away, ask her what remedy to take. Confess I'm out of strength. For the first time in my life. For the last.
Tell her I love her.
Don't wanna be in the hospital again, but my mother takes me anyways. The dirt in the corners is piling higher, thicker, crowding out the light. They send me home from the emergency room; they say there's nothing wrong. But there is.
A few hours later I return and the new shift realizes I have several different kinds of cancer now. One extremely rare. No good chance of a cure. They explain that, and then they carefully lay me out on the operating table, gently lowering me down.
Down. My heart has hardly been beating for weeks, they say. They want to make it beat even slower so they can work their way inside to fix things.
They can only fix them for a while. They're honest about that.
They put the sensing ends of machines on me to watch while I think. They put in drugs.
The water surges up to carry me away. To hold me under. Hold me tight. Hold me.
I'm usually the first among us three girls. Us sisters. I understand I'm the one going on ahead this time, too. Into what? Into what we don't know.
Slowly I sink down. Like before, it's way too cold. Numbing me. I don't feel. No longer. No light. Don't see. No direction. No up no down no in out forward back nothing but nothing but nothing. But.
But I remember being small and closing shut my eyes and shutting them so tight, squeezing them so hard, to make the colors come and here they are and are they real and is this real is anything and am I real and am I real —
And yes.
And yes. I am. And I am going.
Under. Down. Deep.
Going.
Gone.
