Reminder: if you want to submit a story to Strange Horizons before our summer closure, you need to do so in the next few days, by the end of April!  We'd love to see some exciting new fiction, so send 'em if you've got 'em.  SH will reopen to fiction submissions in July.

There's a particular misconception about the Strange Horizons fiction department that I've seen kicking around in a few different places, and I just want to get one clear definitive statement out into the dialogue: we do not have any intentional editorial practices that favor female authors.

Look, we know the numbers as well as our critics do.  The gender breakdown for our published stories doesn't match our submissions percentages--we're tracking disproportionately high in female authors.  We know this.  We're not doing it on purpose.  In fact, we're actually kind of troubled by it.   (There's a typical kind of moment at the end of our editorial meetings these days, where someone points out that we've just agreed to buy three stories by women and only one by a man, and we all kind of groan, oh no, not again.) 

I've recently been in touch with a New Orleans group, Books2Prisoners. They have been delivering books to prisoners in the area for some time and have now started to gather books for the juvenile detention centers as well. It's all slow going, as you can imagine, and yes - every book they had stored was destroyed back in Katrina.

They are looking for books from the middle grade reading level and up, primarily dealing with multi-cultural themes and characters. As many of you kid lit reviewers know, it isn't easy to find juvenile or YA books that have African American characters. Nik is more than happy to take any book - the group will sort through them and deliver those books to the kids that they think will work best and donate the rest to other area groups (libraries, etc.) in need of reading material.

In other words, there are certain books they are looking for but they are so desperate they will take whatever you've got.

I wanted to ask the Sci Fi and Fantasy reviewers in particular to dig deep on this effort - I think SFF titles are often overlooked for teen readers but can resonate the deepest, as many fans of the genre will attest. Ethnic issues are dealt with differently in SFF titles (when you are dealing with aliens or faeries, humans are just one more part of the mix, not the whole deal), and because of that, it is often SFF authors that children will remember the deepest and return to throughout their lives.

Please understand that this is not a momentary thing we are doing - these kids are in serious trouble and if the one thing we can do for them that might make a positive difference is send some books, then you can bet we need to keep doing it for months and months and years and years to come.

We need to send them books and we need to keep on sending.

Here's the mailing address:

Books 2 Prisoners
831 Elysian Fields #143
New Orleans, LA 70117

ATTN: Nik Bose

And Nik has asked that you please send a brief email and give them a heads-up that books are on the way. As they receive their packages at a box, they don't want them to stack up and will make sure someone checks often when they know something is coming. The email address is twista@riseup.net.

Also, I am putting together a wishlist at Powells Books for the group for those folks who want to send something but do not have the piles of ARCs that some of the rest of us have. Any recommendations for multi-cultural titles will be heartily accepted. I'm also looking for good SFF and mysteries to add. I thought I would put it up at Powells so folks could buy used copies, and thus spend a little more (grin).