American writer
Jessica Amanda Salmonson (born January 6, 1950[1][2]) is an American author and editor of fantasy and horror fiction and poetry. She lives on Puget Sound with her partner, artist and editor Rhonda Boothe.
Writing career
Fiction
Salmonson is the author of the Tomoe Gozen trilogy, a fantasy version of the tale of the historical female samurai Tomoe Gozen. Her other novels are The Swordswoman, Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman, an Asian fantasy, and a modern horror novel, Anthony Shriek.[3]
Her short story collections include A Silver Thread of Madness; Mystic Women; John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarreling Through My Head; The Deep Museum: Ghost Stories of a Melancholic; and The Dark Tales. Poetry collections include Horn of Tara and The Ghost Garden.[3]
Her papers (1973-1993) are archived in the collection of the University of Oregon.[4]
Nonfiction
Salmonson has written a number of nonfiction books. Notable is The Encyclopedia of Amazons, an exhaustive alphabetical reference book of worldwide history and legends about women warriors.[5] Other works of nonfiction include Wisewomen and Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore (1992) (coedited with Jules Remedios Faye), and Miniature Vegetables (1994).[1]
In addition to the books noted, she contributed a number of essays, primarily concerning gender and feminism in science fiction, to fanzines in the 1970s.
Editor
Salmonson began her editorial career in 1973 editing the small-press magazine The Literary Magazine of Fantasy & Terror[1] (under the name Amos Salmonson).[6][7] She continued as editor (under her name Jessica Amanda Salmonson) when magazine was revived under the shortened name Fantasy and Terror in 1984, and continued until the final issue in 1996. At the same time, she served as editor of Fantasy Macabre from 1985 to 1996. The magazine was subtitled "Beauty plus strangeness equals terror."[3]
Salmonson was the editor of the anthologies Amazons! and Amazons II; Heroic Visions and Heroic Visions II; Tales by Moonlight and Tales by Moonlight II; and What Did Miss Darrington See: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Stories.[3][1]
She has also edited a series of single-author collections of ghost stories and weird tales, many of them of historical significance to genre literature, including volumes by Marjorie Bowen, Alice Brown, Thomas Burke, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Hildegarde Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne, Augustus Jessopp, Sarah Orne Jewett, Anna Nicholas, Fitz-James O'Brien, Vincent O'Sullivan, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mary Heaton Vorse, Jerome K. Jerome.[citation needed]
