E.C. Osondu (Foreword) is a Nigerian writer and Professor of English at Providence College, Rhode Island, USA. He is the author of two novels – This House is Not For Sale and When the Sky is Ready the Stars Will Appear – and two short-story collections – Voice of America and Alien Stories. He is a winner of the Caine Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Allen & Nirrelle Galson Prize and the BOA Short Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Italian, Icelandic, Belarusiana and French. George Saunders describes Osondu as ‘A vital voice in the short story, telling us new truths with deep humanity.’ His Alien Stories ‘centers around an encounter with the unexpected, and explores what it means to be an alien. With a nod to the dual meaning of alien as both foreigner and exterrestrial. Osondu turns familiar science-fiction tropes and immigration narratives on their heads, blending one with the other to call forth a whirlwind of otherness.’ Betsy Huang (Introduction) is Associate Provost and Dean of the College, the Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein ’64 Distinguished Professor, and Associate Professor of English at Clark University. Her work spans the overlapping spheres of US Multi-ethnic and Asian American Literature, Speculative Fiction, Genre Theory and Critical Ethnic Studies. She served as Director of the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies at Clark and was Clark’s inaugural Chief Officer of Diversity and Inclusion from 2013 to 2016. She has published three books: a monograph, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010), and three co-edited essay collections: Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers, 2015); Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education and Societal Contexts (Palgrave, 2018); and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020 (Cambridge, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies and MELUS, among others. Sarah Rafael García (Associate Editor) is an author, community educator and performance ethnographer. As a child of immigrants and first-generation graduate, she has over 15 years of experience as an Arts Leader in Orange County, California. She is the author of Las Niñas and SanTana’s Fairy Tales, which is now a required Ethnic Studies text in the Santa Ana Unified School District in Southern California. She is also co-editor of Pariahs: Writing from Outside the Margins and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. Her poetry, essays and fiction have been published in various publications. García is the founder of Barrio Writers, LibroMobile and Crear Studio – all art programmes initiated as a response to build cultural relevance and equity for BIPOC folks in her community. As of 2020, her community projects collectively established the LibroMobile Arts Cooperative (LMAC). Currently, she splits her time between writing, stacking books, and curating digital archives and BIPOC art exhibitions – she gives credit to her parents’ GED education and the migrant labour that brought her grandparents to the US as the source of her perseverance and foundation to her accomplishments.
