Jessica Amanda Salmonson


Jessica Amanda Salmonson 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.
FB paghat

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.
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.
Her papers are archived in the collection of the University of Oregon.

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. Other works of nonfiction include Wisewomen and Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore, and Miniature Vegetables.
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. She continued as editor 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."
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.
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, and Jerome K. Jerome.

Awards

Selected bibliography

Novels

Tomoe Gozen trilogy

Tomoe Gozen ; revised as The Disfavored Hero The Golden Naginata
  • ''Thousand Shrine Warrior''

Other novels

The Swordswoman Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman Anthony Shriek, His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm
  • ''Namer of Beasts, Maker of Souls: The Gnostic/Cabbalistic Biography of Merlin''

Collections

  • Tragedy of the Moisty Morning
  • Hag's Tapestry
  • A Silver Thread of Madness
  • John Collier and Fredric Brown Went Quarreling Through My Head
  • Harmless Ghosts
  • Mystic Women: Their Ancient Tales and Legends Recounted by a Woman Inmate of the Calcutta Insane Asylum
  • The Mysterious Doom and Other Ghostly Tales of the Pacific Northwest
  • The Eleventh Jaguarundi and Other Mysterious Persons
  • Phantom Waters: Northwest Legends of Rivers, Lakes & Shores
  • Mister Monkey and Other Sumerian Fables
  • Twenty-one Epic Novels
  • The Dark Tales
  • Strange Miniatures from a Northwest Studio
  • The Deep Museum: Ghost Stories of a Melancholic
  • ''The Complete Weird Epistles of Penelope Pettiweather, Ghost Hunter''

Poetry

  • The Black Crusader and Other Poems of Horror
  • On the Shores of Eternity
  • Feigned Death and Other Sorceries
  • Innocent of Evil: Poems in Prose
  • The Ghost Garden
  • Sorceries and Sorrows: Early Poems
  • Songs of the Maenads
  • Wisewomen and Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary of Lesbian Fairy Lore
  • The Horn of Tara
  • Lake of the Devil
  • The Death Sonnets and Others
  • Pets Given in Evidence of Old English Witchcraft and Other Bewitched Beings
  • ''Daisy Zoo and Other Punk-Ass Nonsense''

Non-fiction

  • ''The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era''

Anthologies edited by

Collections edited by