Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of prose, poetry, and criticism, who divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including Kaleidoscope, Glitter and Mayhem, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, and Welcome to Bordertown; and in her own collection, The Honey Month. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the LA Times, NPR Books and on Tor.com. Other projects include The Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, a performance collective of which she's a founding member along with CSE Cooney and Caitlyn Paxson; Down and Safe, a podcast about Blake's 7, with L. M. Myles, Scott Lynch, and Michael D. Thomas; and editing Goblin Fruit, a web quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry since 2006. Zeus and Amal Amal has written stories about maps, bird women, book women, the Arabic alphabet, singing fish, Damascene dream-crafters, sentient diamond oceans and pockets that are bigger on the inside. Her short story "The Green Book" was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2011, and "The Truth About Owls" won the Locus Award in 2015. Her poems "Song for an Ancient City," "Peach-Creamed Honey," and "Turning the Leaves" won the Rhysling award for Best Short Poem in 2009, 2011 and 2014 respectively, and in 2012 she received the Richard Jefferies Poetry Prize for "Phase Shifting." In her (few) hours of rest she drinks tea, lifts weights, plays harp, and writes letters to her friends by hand. Amal frequents Twitter, where she is often very silly. Photo by Jessica P. Wick.