Yesterday I had the great fortune to read one of my short stories at LitCrawl with members of the Carl Brandon Society (http://carlbrandon.org/). The Carl Brandon Society is a non-profit that promotes the visibility of writers and characters of color in speculative fiction. Please consider donating to them because they are helping to support the creation of inclusive literature. As anyone can attest who reads spec fic - there isn't enough! Speculative fiction needs more voices, more points of view - this is what spec fic is about isn't it, other points of view outside of those that are the familiar? Go buy a book by a writer of color and open your mind to a different voice.
A litle about LitCrawl, LitCrawl is held in dozens of venues throughout the Mission in San Francisco on the last day of LitQuake in three sessions. I still can't believe that it's the first place I got to read in public. I'm beyond luck.y
LitCrawl is volunteer run and coordinated. All of the venues that it is held in are donating their time and place consequently, sometimes shit goes wrong. In our case there was no one to open the place where we were supposed to read! So Emily Jiang, Ayize Jama-Everett and I read on the street, yelling our stories like guerrilla street writers. It was completely awesome, we over came car alarms, rap music and city noise. I think people could hear us (we clustered tightly) and it was a complete blast.
I want to give a shout out to Na'amen Tilahun for coordinating a great Carl Brandon event and then later for his own reading: an excellent, scary werewolf story. Na'amen is completely awesome.
I also want to give a shout out to Emily Jiang (http://www.emilyjiang.com/) who writes some beautiful fiction, go check her stuff out because if you haven't, you should! Also, I'd like to encourage you to check out Ayize's work: http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2012/02/i-dissolve-tough-like-acid-ayize-jama-everett-and-the-liminal-people.html as well, good stuff.
Go buy their stories lovely people - support writers of color, open your minds to new experiences, it's good for your minds and possibly your soul.
