Nisi Shawl

Nisi Shawl (born 1955) is an African American writer, editor, and journalist. They are best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories who writes and teaches about how fantastic fiction might reflect real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, physical ability, age, and other sociocultural factors.

Shawl was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They started attending the Residential College of the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 1971 at the age of 16, but did not graduate.

They were, however, a 1992 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and are a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. They are a board member of Clarion West and one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society.

Shawl's short stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, the Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, Semiotext(e) and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Brian Charles Clark of the fiction review site Curled Up With a Good Book, praised their debut collection, Filter House (2008) – which gathered 11 previously published and three original short fiction pieces – saying that: "Shawl’s keen sense of justice and their adamant anti-colonialism always ride just beneath the surface of their 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."

Shawl is the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction, a creative writing handbook derived from the authors' workshop of the same name, in which participants explore techniques to help them write credible characters outside their own cultural experience. Reviewer Genevieve Williams of speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons summed up about this guidebook: "The practices advocated and concepts presented in Writing the Other may seem PC to some, but following them will help to ensure that an author gives more than lip service to diversity and is thoughtful about the creation and development of societies, cultures, and characters (which we all should be anyway). Much of what Shawl and Ward advocate is, quite simply, good practice: the avoidance of cliches, flat characters, unintended effects, and other hallmarks of lazy writing."

Shawl's first novel, Neo-Victorian, Belgian Congo–set, steampunk story Everfair, was released in September 2016 by Tor Books, with a cover illustration by Hong Kong artist Victo Ngai.

Everfair is an alternate history of the African Congo, Europe, and the United States, during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, where Shawl's science fictional turning point is that "the native populations (of the Congo) had learned about steam technology a bit earlier." Their novel imagines that British Fabian Socialists team up with African American Christian missionaries to purchase land in the Congo Basin from Leopold II of Belgium, thus creating a speculative new nation in their version of history, where citizens could experiment with the freedoms they had lacked in their original homelands, as well as benefit from a key technology of the industrial revolution, namely steam engines.

In 2009, Shawl donated their archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.