Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon
Born 1989 (age 34–35)[1]
California, U.S.
Education Stanford University, Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin
Occupation Writer
Known for
Website www.riverssolomon.com

Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction[2] for their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and in 2020 their second novel, The Deep, won the Lambda Literary Award.[3] Their third novel, Sorrowland, was published in May 2021.

Personal life

Solomon is non-binary and intersex and states that they use fae/faer and they/them pronouns.[4] They describe themselves as "a dyke, an anarchist, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade."[4]

As of 2018, Solomon lives in Cambridge, UK, with their family.[4] Originally from the United States, they received their BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University in California and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.[1] They grew up in California, Indiana, Texas, and New York. Their literary influences include Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Jean Toomer, and Doris Lessing.[4][5]

Work

Solomon's debut novel was An Unkindness of Ghosts, a science fiction novel exploring the conjunction between structural racism and generation ships. It was published in 2017 by Akashic Books. The book was a best book of 2017 in The Guardian, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bustle, and others, as well as a Stonewall Honor Book,[6] Firecracker winner,[7] and a finalist for the Locus, Lambda, Tiptree, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and Hurston/Wright awards.[8][9][10]

Amal El-Mohtar wrote of An Unkindness of Ghosts, "Reading it, I felt it carving out a vastness inside me, pouring itself into me like so many stars, and the more I read the bigger I felt, falling down a rabbit-hole of sky and wanting only to go deeper and farther with every page."[11] Gary K. Wolfe opined "All this might make An Unkindness of Ghosts sound like a programmatic slavery allegory dressed in generation starship trappings, but Solomon’s evocation of this society is so sharply detailed and viscerally realized, the characters so closely observed, the individual scenes so tightly structured, that the novel achieves surprising power and occasional brilliance."[12]

Their second book, The Deep, (2019, Saga Press), is based on the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by the experimental hip-hop group Clipping, and depicts a utopian underwater society built by the water-breathing descendants of pregnant slaves thrown overboard from slave ships. The Deep won the 2020 Lambda Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula, Locus, and Hugo awards.[13][14][15]

On October 3, 2019, it was announced that MCD Books had acquired Solomon's next book, Sorrowland, which was published in May 2021. Sorrowland is described as "a genre-bending work of gothic fiction that wrestles with the tangled history of racism in America and the marginalization of society’s undesirables."[16] In a review, Hephzidah Anderson succinctly captures the residual emotions this book evokes, writing "It’s about escape, self-acceptance and queer love. It’s about genocide and the exploitation of black bodies, self-delusion and endemic corruption, motherhood and inheritance."[17]

Solomon's shorter work has been featured in Black Warrior Review,[18] The New York Times,[19] Guernica,[20] Best American Short Stories,[21] Tor.com,[22] and elsewhere. They collaborated with authors Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, and S. L. Huang on the serial novel The Vela.[23]

References

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  21. ↑ Pitlor, Heidi and Gay, Roxane (editors), The Best American Short Stories 2018 Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2018.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

Reception

An Unkindness of Ghosts

The Deep

Sorrowland

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