Feminist Fiction Friday is Back with Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson mostly writes short fiction, but her novel Fudoki was declared one of the best SF/F novels of 2003 by Publisher's Weekly. She's won a number of awards over the year and in 2012 her novella, The Man Who Bridged the Mist won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. (You can read it here for free.) She also writes poetry and essays. You can read more of her work on her website.
An editor as well as a writer, she's worked for Tor Books, Dark Horse Comics, and as content manager for Microsoft Reader.
She's' not only won awards, but she's a final judge for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Twenty of her stories are archived at the free speculative fiction site (a treasure trove of stories by everyone from Isaac Asimov to Roger Zelazny. The stories by Johnson offer a large representative sample of her work and include such award-winners as "Fox Magic" and "Ponies."

Fudoki, is the second in a planned trilogy set in ancient Japan. The first, Fox Woman, was a love story about a man and a fox woman (Kitsune.) Fudoki is about Kagaya-hime, a sometime woman warrior who may or may not be a figment of the imagination of a dying empress.
Her debut short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, contains 300 pages of her short fiction.
She gives great interviews.
"Making the Unreal Real at GeekMom.
"An Interview with Kij Johnson" at Apex Magazine
"A Terrifying Mix of Honesty and Rigor" in Clarkesworld Magzine
Here's a Los Angeles Review of Books review on At the Mouth of the River of Bees where the reviewer focused on the sexual politicsof the stories.
If you have a few minutes today, sample one of Kij Johnson's stories and come away refreshed and impressed.

Feminist Fiction Friday--CJ Cherryh

I started reading CJ Cherryh's books in the mid-70s but somehow (denial is a powerful drug), it never occurred to me that she would now be ... coming up on 70.  (September 1, as a matter of fact.) I always figured that she used her initials instead of her full name (Carolyn Janice) because most science fiction writers at the time were men. It never occurred to me that "Cherryh" was not her real last name. According to Wikipedia, she added the silent H at the end of Cherry because her then-editor (Donald A. Wolheim) thought "Cherry" sounded too much like a romance novelist.
Well, nobody mistakes her for a romance novelist now--not after 60 science fiction and fantasy novels, a clutch of Awards (including the John W. Campbell award and a couple of Hugos).
And did you know she taught Latin and Greek after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oklahoma and recieving a Master's Degree from Johns Hopkins where she was a Woodrow Wilson fellow.
Cherryh has never pigeon-holed her writing into any specific genre or sub-genre. (In fact, she's gone on record as being very much against that kind of categorizing.) She has written books from alien points of view. She has written books in shared worlds. I am a huge fan of Cherryh's fantasy and the first book of hers I read was the first of the books about time-traveling Morgaine, The Gate of Ivrel. I always thought the time-gates of her Morgaine books were much more interesting than any of the Stargates. I also loved Cyteen, which was a genre mash-up on a grand scale, featuring a cloned scientist trying to avoid the fate of her original.