The Outspoken and the Incendiary

Terry Bisson (1942–2024) was an author, editor, political activist, and friend to many. He was a Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer of seven novels, numerous short works of fiction, and over a dozen books for children and young adults. He was the author of On a Move: The Story of Mumia Abu Jamal and editor of PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series. PM Press published his books TVA Baby, Fire on the Mountain, and The Left Left Behind. He also wrote the long-running “This Month in History” series for Locus. His radical politics landed him in jail for refusing to give testimony to a grand jury investigating the radical underground. He operated Jacobin Books, a “revolutionary” mail-order book service, from 1985 to 1990. He was as much an activist’s activist as he was a literary powerhouse.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Fortress of Solitude, Brooklyn Crime Novel, and eleven other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in seven volumes. His Outspoken Authors book is The Collapsing Frontier.

Nisi Shawl is an award-winning African American writer, editor, and journalist. They are best known for their science fiction and fantasy stories and novels dealing with race, gender, physical ability, and sexual orientation. Even before Shawl’s steampunk-flavored alternate history of the “Belgian” Congo, Everfair, took the sci-fi world by storm, their short stories had already established them as a cutting-edge Black writer whose politically charged fiction is in the grand feminist tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Joanna Russ. Their Outspoken Authors book is Talk like a Man.

Nalo Hopkinson is a Canadian, Jamaica-born, award-winning superstar of modern fantasy. She has edited and coedited several fantasy anthologies and taught at the Clarion workshops and other venues. She has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award, World Fantasy Award, Aurora Award, and the Sunburst Award (twice), among others. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master, in recognition of "lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy." Her Outspoken Authors book is Report from Planet Midnight.

A direct descendant of philosopher G.W. Hegel, Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, science author of The Fourth Dimension, online editor of Flurb, award-winning SF writer with two Philip K. Dick Awards, and transreal cyberpunk. A native of Kentucky, he lives in Silicon Valley. His Outspoken Authors book is Surfing the Gnarl.

Peter Coyote is an American actor, double Emmy winning narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest. He is the author of Sleeping Where I Fall, The Rainman’s Third Cure, Tongue of a Crow, and two books on Buddhism: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet Buddha, and Zen in the Vernacular.