Black Fiction with Black Folk: An Introduction, a Life Journey

I’m not going to tell you about how I started reading SciFi and Fantasy books – I was in 5th grade and The Hobbit redrew my world – you’ve heard that story before. Yours may even be similar. I’m also not going to tell you about why I stopped reading genre fiction. That’s actually kind of self-explanatory – I could only read stories about someone else’s imaginary future or past so many times and still not be included in that vision. I found myself arguing way more than I agreed, yelling “What about me!” so many times that my husband stopped noticing. Yeah. Time to move on. What I am going to tell you about is why I’m back. For a variety of reasons – mostly to prove to myself I could – I wrote a book. Doing so gave me the credibility required (clearly very little) to land on a panel at the local SciFi/Fantasy convention discussing People of Color in Fandom. As far as I can tell, these panels at fan conventions are either: 1 — An excuse to get all of us in one room, so the organizers can do a head count (“We’re got enough minorities to fill a conference room! Put that on the website!”) Or, 2 — A chance for White folks in fandom to sit around and ask all the embarrassing questions they can’t ask at the Star Wars fan party or the panels on how to dress your dog as a dragon so he’ll match your new Daenerys cosplay.

Who doesn’t want to do this? My dog. My dog doesn’t want to do this. Anyway, like so many things, we ethnics got something out of the panel that wasn’t in the program b…