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.

Friday Feminist Fiction--Connie Willis

Photo by Kyle Cassidy from http://www.sftv.org/cw/

The first time I attended San Diego Comic Con (2008), Connie Willis was one of the guests. She showed up for her seminar looking like a statuesque suburban granny and totally rocked the hour to a packed house of admirers. She told a story about how she met her husband (a retired physicist and how she might not have in response to a question about faith and fate. She talked about her unsentimental treatment of death and how her mother's death when she was a child shaped her world view.
She had brought along her lovely, equally statuesque, daughter and everyone in the room went away feeling like they'd shared some quality time with the woman who has just been named a "Grand Master" (for lifetime achiement) by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
I (heart) Connie Willis.
She has won 11 Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards and a ton of other awards too. She has won for both novels and short stories. Connie Willis can write anything!
Lincoln's Dreams was the first of Connie's novels I read, a wonderful love story that slipped gracefully between genres. I followed that up with To Say Nothing of the Dog, which delighted me in the way it looped back and forth over itself and is one of her Hugo Award-winning works.
She has talked about the long spaces between books (and pointed to her friend George R. R. Martin as another writer who teastes his fans this way), but while we're waiting for the next novel, there are plenty of her short stories to keep us reading.
Her official website is here.
You can "like" Connie Willis on Facebook.