November 15, 2019 · 1:39 pm

What I Wrote & Edited in 2019

2019what_I_edited

It’s the beginning of listy-season, and looking back on 2019, here’s everything I had wrote & edited in the past year. Again, I am eligible for the Hugo for Best Editor, Long Form, but moreover, I invite you to consider my authors as well for this year’s nominating season (especially new titles which are eligible for the Hugo for Best Graphic Novel and Best Series, which I highlight below, but *any* can be nominated, of course!). Full details are below the jump, and I appreciate your time. 🙂

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September 22, 2019 · 2:49 pm

Autumn Travels

This fall, I have a series of travels lined up. Details below!

 

Next weekend, I’ll be a special guest at Chicago Steampunk Exposition, where my schedule is part of their A-List programming, so folks with have double the opportunity to see my panels.

Friday, September 27
So You Want to Publish Your Steampunk Book 
6:00 PM in Lakeshore A

Saturday, September 28
Steam Around the World: Steampunk Beyond Victoriana 
1:00 PM in State
Envisioning a Better Steam Society: Social Issues & Steampunk
4:00 PM in Madison

Sunday, September 29
Steam Around the World: Steampunk Beyond Victoriana
11:00 AM in State
Envisioning a Better Steam Society: Social Issues & Steampunk
3:00 PM in Division


Next, I’ll be moderating for the seventh year in a row at New York Comic Con!

Geeks of Color VII – Not Another Race Panel Edition
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Room 1B03 – Javits Center
Geeks of Color is the premiere NYCC panel on career-building in comics, book publishing, gaming, animation, and film/TV, now in its 7th year! Many professionals of color are tired of answering Diversity 101 questions. So here’s where we geek out about our jobs, instead! Featuring Locus & Nebula Award-winning author P. Djeli Clark, Prof. Sargon Donabed, cosplayer Jay Justice, comic author/ editor Nadia Shammas, and comic author/artist Wendy Xu. Moderated by Hugo-Award nominated editor Diana M. Pho.

Fighting Fascism in Fandom Aka We Really DO Care: Protecting Fandom from Bigotry
12:15 pm – 1:15 pm
Room 1A02 – Javits Center
During this current political moment, pros from across geek media talk about how we can protect fandom spaces from hatred and bigotry while also celebrating the geeky things we love. Featuring #1 NYT bestselling author Wesley Chu, writer/podcaster Jay Edidin, multiple award-nominated author P. Djeli Clark, Hugo-winning author / disability advocate Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, mental health advocate / author Zin E. Rocklyn, and Hugo-winning journalist/editor Mimi Mondal. Moderated by editor Diana M. Pho.

At the 18th Annual Florida Writers Conference, I’ll be taking pitches, teaching a workshop and speaking on panels:

Workshop
Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone
Writing is hard but writing the other is even harder. Cultural appropriation, diverse books, and more — these buzzwords abound in publishing today. What do they mean, and can you write the unfamiliar?

Panels
Diversity in Publishing
Writing the Other

My travels end at the Sirens Conference in Denver, from October 24–27, 2019. This will be my first time at this writers conference, which focuses on women writing fantasy, and I’ve only heard terrific things from past attendees. The line-up for this year is especially exciting:

“Our 2019 guests of honor are brilliant, each with incisive, thoughtful achievements in her field: Mishell Baker, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Rebecca Roanhorse, and for the first time, a scholar, Dr. Suzanne Scott, and a Sirens Studio guest of honor, Roshani Chokshi. And while perhaps only a few of our thousand conversations in 2019 will analyze heroism, gender and progress in fantasy literature—while the rest address the other million topics related to gender and fantasy literature—we think that you’ll find both our guests and their work critical to any discussion of heroism and gender representation in fantasy literature.”

If you’d like to grab a coffee and a chat while I’m there, feel free to reach out and schedule a meeting.

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September 2, 2019 · 7:27 pm

New Publication! Mimicry: A Short Play

JSAAEA logo

Earlier this year, I was invited to submit a creative work for the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, and right before WorldCon, I was notified of its publication. Huzzah!  This is the first piece in a very long time that comes back to my playwriting roots before steampunk (gasp) and academia were serious ventures. But it’s still all about queer girls, time travel, and exploring nuances of Asian American identity. A snippet about the piece is below, and you can read the short play online for free!

This short play is inspired by the author’s lived experience as a queer Vietnamese-American woman in academia and in US society. This theatrical piece, centered around two young women meeting for the first time after several years, reflects upon the mutable divergence of shared memory, while also exploring intersectional feminist theory and the Vietnamese-American community. This is also a critique of US-based stereotypes about young Asian-American women, and how social prejudices and microaggressions can result in internalized anti-Asian misogyny. Like the range of identities and life experiences that characters Laurel and Mattie have, the Asian diasporic experience in the United States contains multitudes.

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August 9, 2019 · 9:51 am

WorldCon 2019 Schedule

This summer has been hyper-focused on travel for me, but I hadn’t been as active in posting my plans online — sorry about that! I’ve had a whirlwind last few weeks of travel from ReaderCon to the Cascade Writer’s Conference to RWA and now Dublin is just around the bend. I’ll be seeing authors and agents (or stopping by the various parties going on), but if you want to pin me down at specific points, here’s my panel schedule:

Everyone Is Invited – LGBTQIA+ in Comics
Format: Panel
16 Aug 2019, Friday 1:30 – 2:40PM (13:30 – 14:20), Odeon 1 (Point Square Dublin)
Despite the lack of earlier representation, there have always been queer fans of and professionals in comics. Now with creators being more vocal and visible members of the LGBTQIA+ community, we’re seeing characters that don’t even need to come out, but are written and drawn with queer text rather than subtext. Let’s talk about what’s out there, where to find it, and what we’d all like to see more of!
Ms Gavia Baker-Whitelaw (The Daily Dot) (M), Jacq Applebee, Rosa Devine (Fighting Words), Diana M. Pho (Tor Books)

Gender and sexuality in YA
Format: Panel
17 Aug 2019, Saturday 10:00 – 10:50, ECOCEM Room (CCD)
Young adulthood is a formative time in many ways, but especially when it comes to gender and sexuality. Both topics have been increasing in interest and importance in YA books. How do our books reflect explorations of identity? Why is it important that they do so? Has this changed over time? And how can we approach these topics respectfully – and with an eye on intersectionality?
Sam Bradbury (Hodder & Stoughton) (M), Diana M. Pho (Tor Books), Victoria “V.E.” Schwab (Tor Books, Titan, HarperCollins, Scholastic), Rei Rosenquist, Rachel Hartman 

Kaffeeklatsch: Diana M. Pho
Format: Kaffeeklatsch
17 Aug 2019, Saturday 2:00 Pm – 2:50 PM (14:00 – 14:50), Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Looking forward to seeing some friendly faces there!

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April 4, 2019 · 10:16 pm

An Unexpected Anniversary — 10 years as Ay-leen the Peacemaker and Neo-Victorian Studies

One of the very first pictures of me as Ay-leen the Peacemaker, taken in May 2009. Credit to Bob Nittoli,Today, I got a pleasant and long-awaited email: Neo-Victorian Studies published their special issue about “Neo-Victorian Asia”, which is guest edited by Elizabeth Ho, Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. My contribution,”Analog Incarnations: Steampunk Performance Across Time” focuses on the power of marginalized performance in steampunk subculture, and it includes the short, one-person play I wrote as my final project for my Masters. Analog Incarnations is weirdly fun, with a Doctor-Whoish-timey-whimey angle, a liberal use of Power Point and Nerf guns, and an imagined video/FX budget beyond my means. It’s exactly why this is a published play and not a produced one. It also presents, for the first time online, the origins of Ay-leen the Peacemaker, my Tonkinese Buddhist assassin-for-hire steamsona.

Looking through my photos for a good one to include in this post, I realized that next month will mark my decade-long anniversary involved in the steampunk community! Here’s one of the very first pictures of me as Ay-leen the Peacemaker, taken in May 2009 (credit to Bob Nittoli). I don’t make it out to as many cons and events as I used to, due to travelling to cons and conferences for my editorial life, but I still keep in touch with many fellow steampunks I’ve met over the years. Of course, the Peacemaker has a special place on my living room bookshelf. Alongside the steampunk/ steam–tangental books published during my time with Tor.

It’s amazing how much time flew by like it was nothing. Or maybe time just flies when you’re having fun!

 

Check out the special issue, and enjoy the range of wonderful intellectual goodies it contains. The complete table of contents are—

Articles
Introduction: Neo-Victorian Asia: An Inter-imperial Approach by Elizabeth Ho
Japanese Neo-Victorian Fictions: Looking Back to the Victorian Age from Japan by Yui Nakatsuma
Japanese Dandies in Victorian Britain: Writing Masculinity in Japanese Girls’ Comics by Waiyee Loh
Last Empress Fiction and Asian Neo-Victorianism by Elizabeth Ho
The Neo-Victorian Chinese Diaspora: Crossing Genders and Postcolonial Subversion in Pacific Gold Rush Novels by Barbara Franchi
Analog Incarnations: Steampunk Performance across Time by Diana M. Pho
A Therapeutic Mangle of History: Towards a Politics of Reconciliation in Arjun Raj Gaind’s Empire of Blood by Kurian Therakath Peter
Secondary Pleasures, Spatial Occupations and Postcolonial Departures: Park Chan-Wook’s Agassi/The Handmaiden and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith by Park Heebon, Julie Sanders, and Chung Moonyoung

Reviews/Review Essays
Neo-Victorian Adventures for Young Readers: Review of Sonja Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day’s The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture
Review by Sandra Dinter
The Other (Neo-)Victorians: Review of Laura Helen Marks, Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic
Review by Saverio Tomaiuolo
The Hauntings of Charlotte Brontë: Review of Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds.), Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives
Review by Catherine Paula Han

(And if anyone wants to produce my show, you know how to reach me đź?‰ )

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January 22, 2019 · 9:00 am

Con or Bust: Get Involved!

Signal boosting an awesome organization that I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, Con or Bust! For those unfamiliar with them, they are a non profit who provides financial assistance to fans of color to attend SFF conventions. They’re looking for new Board members* to help manage their workload for the coming year and are receiving applications for those interested in participating.  Some description below, and full details can be found on their website about supporting a great cause.

If you value Con or Bust’s work, now’s a great time to get involved: at the end of January, up to four people can join Mark Oshiro, Tanya DePass, and Lulu Kadhim on our Board of Directors. I will be stepping down on the grounds that a decade is long enough (obligatory Grosse Pointe Blank reference), so this is a genuine opportunity to shape Con or Bust’s future and help it continue its work.

If you’re interested, please read on, and then email a short statement of interest to info@con-or-bust.org by Friday, January 25, 2019.

*Full disclosure: I served a term on the Board in the past, but am no longer involved on the Board.

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January 1, 2019 · 5:14 pm

What I edited and wrote in 2018

Bitmoji Image

 

Ringing in 2019 with a retrospective list of what I edited last year. For those wondering, I am eligible for the Hugo for Best Editor, Long Form again but I invite you to consider my authors as well for this year’s nominating season. You can look into more info on my year’s work below the jump, and thank you for the time! ^^

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August 12, 2018 · 6:58 pm

My WorldCon 76 Schedule

My first WorldCon is just around the corner! Below is my schedule, and I’d like to give kudos to Mary Robinette Kowal and the rest of the WC team for all of their hard work with the programming overhaul.  I’m really excited to be on board on a wide range of panels. Agents & authors can reach out if you are interested in booking a meeting in my off-time.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 17

10 – 11 AM
Young Adult: Looking at the World Through a Skewed Lens (210E)
One of the key advantages that SFF has is allowing us to tip the real world to the side to expose the interconnective tissue. This is often a powerful lens for Young Adult authors. It allows them to obscure issues with fantastic set dressing. Our panelists look at what that skewed lens offers, be it fantasy, science fiction, steampunk or other genres. How does it affect the stories they can tell and the audiences they can attract? What are some of the best ways to leverage the skewed lens of SFF for a Young Adult audience?
Panelists: Diana M. Pho (M), Tina Connolly, Scott Sigler, Gail Carriger, Fonda Lee

5 – 6 PM
Kaffeeklatsch: Diana M. Pho
211B1 (San Jose Convention Center)
Pick my brain! Learn about books & other things!
For all kaffeeklatsches, you have to sign up the day of at the sign-up booth in the exhibit hall to reserve a spot.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 18

10 AM – 12 PM
Wild Cards Signing (San Jose Convention Center Autograph Area)
George R. R. Martin | Kevin Andrew Murphy | Melinda M. Snodgrass | Mary Anne Mohanraj | Marko Kloos | Caroline Spector | Walter Jon Williams | Saladin Ahmed
The long awaited reprint of Wild Cards VIII: One Eyed Jacks is now pubbed! You have an opportunity to get a copy while at Worldcon and to get autographs from many of the authors. This is a special group signing. Copies of the trade paperback will be available from Borderlands Books, in the Dealer’s area.  The authors will ONLY be signing Wild Cards books.

(I’ll be chilling there for the first half-hour)

11 AM – 12 PM
We Have Always Played Games: Women at the Gaming Table (210C)
The Fake Geek Girl is a harmful stereotype which has been used to make women feel unwelcome at the gaming table. This panel will tear apart that stereotype, and talk about all the ways in which women have contributed to the gaming world.
Panelists: Donna Prior (M), Marie Brennan, Diana M. Pho, Veronica Belmont, Erika Ensign

12 PM – 1 PM
Defining Steampunk (210F)
Is it artistically transformed carefully constructed Victorian clothing? Is it cunningly modified thrift store finds? Is it a fusion of Victorian elegance, pure fantasy, and steam-powered science-fictional engineering? Or is it any old thing that you just slapped a few gears on?
Panelists:  Elektra Hammond (M), Anastasia Hunter, William C. Tracy, Diana M. Pho, Jaymee Goh PhD

2 –  3PM
What’s Upcoming at Tor (210C)
Tor editors present recent and upcoming titles!
With Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Beth Meacham, Miriam Weinberg, Diana M. Pho, Carl Engle-Laird, Lindsey Hall, Lee Harris

7 PM – whenever?
phở with Pho (unofficial event)
San Jose has a vibrant Vietnamese community, so I’ll be in Little Saigon in pursuit of awesome phở ! Reach out for location & details.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 19TH

8 – 10PM
Hugo Award Ceremony
In the Grand Ballroom.
I’ll be there, looking rad and fab. Come say hi!

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May 1, 2018 · 8:00 am

Hath No Fury – Now up for Pre-Order

Back in 2016, editor Melanie Meadors reached out about my interest in being involved in an anthology she had in the works focusing on stories that defy female stereotypes. I gladly signed on, and later that year in the weeks after the election, I turned in my contribution: a pistol shot of an essay titled “Anger is a Friend to Love.” I’m pleased to know that later in 2018 this essay will be released to the world as part of this amazing collection of fiction and non-fiction.

HATH NO FURY, edited by Melanie Meadors and J.M. Martin, features an introduction by Margaret Weis, a foreword by Robin Hobb, and all-new material from Seanan McGuire, Carol Berg, Lian Hearn, Elaine Cunningham, Gail Z. Martin, Nisi Shawl, William C. Dietz, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Elizabeth Vaughan, Dana Cameron, Philippa Ballantine, and many more.

Book description
Mother. Warrior. Caregiver. Wife. Lover. Survivor. Trickster. Heroine. Leader. Hath No Fury contains approximately 20 meaningful stories that defy the stereotypes. In this anthology, readers should expect to find super-smart, purpose-driven, ultra-confident heroines. Here, it’s not the hero who does all the action while the heroine smiles and bats her eyelashes; Hath No Fury’s women are champions, not princesses in distress. Embracing the strong warriors to the silent but powerful, to even the timid who muster up the bravery to face down a terrible evil, the women of Hath No Fury will make their indelible marks and leave you breathless for more.

The book comes out in July 23, 2018, and people can pre-order it here.

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February 6, 2018 · 8:00 am

What I edited in 2017 aka my #AuntieEditor list

It’s that time of year for award nominations, and so, for your consideration, here is a list of all I edited in 2017.  Some books are steampunk, some are not, but all are simply fabulous!

I appreciate any support for my authors; several of them have made the 2017 Locus Recommended Reading List (huzzah!) This is also the first year that I qualify for Best Editor, Long Form, and hey, if you liked several of my titles,  little hat tip in this direction goes a long way. 🙂

After the jump, read more about these books, (listed in publication order) and, perhaps, check these out at the bookseller of your choice.

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