This is the website of fantasy writer and poet Saladin Ahmed.  My fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, IGMS, Clockwork Phoenix 2, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other neat places.  My poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Callaloo, The Brooklyn Review, Big City Lit, Inclined To Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry.  To check out my writing, please see my bibliography.  If you’d like to learn more about me, head over to my biography page.  You can also get in touch with me on Facebook and LiveJournal, or via email at saladinahmed [at] hotmail.com.  Thanks for dropping by!

This is pretty cool: I just sold the audio rights to my ‘just-might-make-it-onto-the-Nebula-ballot’ short story “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela!”  It has been picked up by PodCastle, the popular fantasy fiction podcast site.

Hi!  A quick note here to mention that Callaloo Volume 32, Issue 4 is now out.  The issue features work from luminaries of African American and Middle Eastern poetry like Sonia Sanchez and Mahmoud Darwish.  Less impressively, it contains two poems (”How to survive in Detroit #32″ and “Recite!”) from yours truly!

Also, I’ve sold another story!  “General Akmed’s Revenge?” is my short-short slipstream-ish response to the crappy anti-Arab action movies of the 1980s.  It contains gratuitous Super Mario Brothers-inspired metaphors and is slated to appear in the March issue of Expanded Horizons.

Howdy, folks!  Been a while.  Hope 2010 is going well for y’all so far.

2009 was one of the most intense years of my life.  In the realm of the personal this intensity took both scary and awe-inspiringly exciting forms.  But this is not the place for that.  This is the place where I talk about being a fantasy writer (and, semi-vestigially, a poet*).  2009 was my first year as a published fantasy writer, and it was a good one:

–Three of my stories ( “Where Virtue Lives,” “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” and “Judgment of Swords and Souls”) appeared in high-profile markets.

–I sold a fourth story – a supervillain piece! – to another big market (Strange Horizons).  This one should appear in the next month or two.

–I read (and looked goofy) at the New York Review of Science Fiction’s reading series, Readercon, and the World Fantasy Convention.

–I was a guest on the hallowed Hour of the Wolf radio show, and people actually called in to talk about my fiction!

–One of my stories got nods in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review, Library Journal, SF Site, and elsewhere.  Another got props from eminent SF/F reviewer Rich Horton, both in the field’s paper of record, Locus, and in one of his end-of-the-year summaries.

–I was invited to join the simply awesome, invitation-only Rio Hondo workshop where I gallingly, appallingly pretended to be in a position to critique seasoned vets like Michaela Roesner, Walter Jon Williams, Karen Joy Fowler, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Maureen McHugh and others.

–I joined the excellent Writers group Altered Fluid.

–I became a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the field’s professional organization.

–I finished a semi-polished draft of my first fantasy novel, set in the same quasi-Islamic heroic fantasy world as two of my stories.

Whew!  As I say, a good year.  I also, of course, collected plenty of rejection letters and a couple of not-so-great reviews and spent days on end despairing about my nascent writing career.  But why in the hell would I want to recap that?

*Though I don’t really write poetry anymore, I did publish a couple of poems (see my bibliography) and landed my most prestigious publication yet (in a forthcoming issue of Callaloo).  I also learned that my poems were being taught in a college course – which makes four college courses now (that I know of) in which this has been the case!  Yes, I’m petty enough to have kept track — poetry, like crime, doesn’t pay.  So one takes one’s satisfactions where one can…

Hello and hope you out there in Internetland are doing well. A couple of items of note:

1) I will be giving a reading at the 2009 World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, CA.  On Halloween, no less!  This is both exciting and a bit scurry since this is my first solo reading as a fantasy writer (I did lots back in the day as a poet).  If you’re going to be at the con, please do come on down to the Garden Room @ 12:30 pm on Saturday, 10/31.

2) With my typical organizational aplomb in full muthafunkin effect, I neglected to mention earlier that, on Oct. 3rd, I was a guest on the estimable Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf radio show.  It was loads of fun — the show has been a mianstay of the NYC speculative fiction world for decades now, and PEOPLE ACTUALLY CALLED IN TO DISCUSS MY STORIES!  As a newbie writer, this was a true thrill.  The show is archived here, under “Oct 3rd.”

Hello again!  Just a quick note to let y’all know that my story “Judgment of Swords and Souls” is now up at Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show.  “Judgment” is set in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms, the same quasi-Islamic fantasy setting of “Where Virtue Lives” and my current novel project.

While there is a free preview behind the link, this story’s not quite a freebie.  But for a mere $2.50 for the issue you can read not only my story but tales from several talented SF/F authors, including the awesome Aliette de Bodard.  Please go check it out, ‘and thank you for your support.’

Hello, Three Readers! Has it really been two months since I last wrote?

A few bits of my flesh and soul for you then, since you must be starving:

– fantasybookcritic has posted my story “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” as a free online sample of the awesome anthology Clockwork Phoenix 2.  Please go read it and be sure to tell them in the comments how much you loved my story   Then you’ll want to do yourself the favor of buying a copy of the anthology!

– I’ve sold my short-short story “Doctor Diablo Goes Through The Motions,” about a smart-alecky Latino supervillain, to Strange Horizons.  They’re a great magazine publishing a genuinely diverse range of some of the best genre fiction out there.  I’m geeked to join their authors’ ranks.  The story’s (thus far) slated to appear in February.

– I’ve recently had my poems  “How To Survive In Detroit #32″ and “Recite!” accepted for publication at the stalwart journal Callaloo, which I’ve long considered one of the best and most important literary journals in English.  Sharing a ‘past contributors’ list with Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Alice Walker?  Yes, please!  The poems should appear some time next year.

Howdy!  A few things to report:

First of all, Clockwork Phoenix 2, a wonderful anthology of “tales of beauty and strangeness,” is now available at Amazon and other online (and brick-and-mortar) stores.  Said wonderful anthology just happens to include my story “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela.”  Buy a copy, buy a copy, buy a copy!  Publisher’s Weekly starred review here!

Secondly, I will be taking part in two readings at this year’s Readercon — the Clockwork Phoenix 2 reading on Saturday the 11th at 2pm, and the Beneath Ceaseless Skies reading on Sunday the 12th at 1pm.  Hope to see you there!

Finally, a particularly WTF moment from the warmongering jingoist cartoon so many of us loved as kids…

Since my last post of about a month ago, my first published fantasy story, “Where Virtue Lives,” has received several reviews.  Free SF Reader gave it 3.5 stars, the Internet Review of Science Fiction took issue with the inevitable seriality but called the story itself “A partnership of colorful characters…formed in a likely setting for entertaining adventures,” and Locus’s Rich Horton, whose reviews I quite like, said that “the main characters’ interaction is enjoyable and bodes well for further pieces.”

I’m also happy to report that my story “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” which appears in the about-to-drop Clockwork Phoenix 2, is mentioned by name in the Publishers Weekly starred (!) review of that anthology.

***

In other news, I spent the first week of June in the mountains above Taos, NM, taking part in the Rio Hondo Writers’ Workshop.  Since Rio Hondo is very much a pro/peer workshop, my being asked (by the mighty Walter Jon Williams) to join the fun was a big deal for me.  I met amazing, accomplished genre writers who’ve been at this a lot longer than I have, I was able to read some of their brilliant works in raw form, and I got their takes on the first chunk of my in-progress Crescent Moon Kingdoms novel.  Plus, the from-scratch food — kebabs, gumbo, chili, bread pudding, etc. — was simply awesome.

The new: my Bibliography has been updated, a scant few Links have been added to the site, and contact info has been added to the Biography.

The tardy: I imagine anyone reading this is either already planning to attend or has already made other plans, buuuut:  I, along with two other great writers from my badass writers’ group, Tabula Rasa, will be reading tonight at the South Street Seaport Museum as part of the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series.  Details here.

The obligatory random old-school Sesame Street clip: Dag, them thar monsters can disco!