Faerie Escape: Ellen Kushner

I sat on one panel with Ellen Kusher and wanted to share more of her work for readers here.

From the bio in the Faerie Escape program:


Ellen Kushner weaves together multiple careers as a writer, radio host and performer. She is also a popular speaker at venues from synagogue pulpits to science fiction conventions and beyond.

Since 1996, she has been heard by audiences around the country as the host of PRI’s award-winning national public radio series, Sound & Spirit, which Bill Moyers called “the best program on public radio, bar none.”

Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, was hailed as the progenitor of the “Mannerpunk” (or “Fantasy of Manners”) school of urban fantasy. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won both the 1991 World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. With Delia Sherman she co-wrote The Fall of the Kings. Her most recent novel, The Privilege of the Sword, a genre-crossing, gender-bending novel published by Bantam Books and Small Beer Press, was nominated for an eclectic range of honors, from New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, to the Nebula and Tiptree Awards (nominee), and won the Locus Award. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Japanese, French, German, Latvian and Finnish.

As a performer, her solo spoken word works include Esther: the Feast of Masks, and The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer ‘Nutcracker’ for Chanukah (with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, on Rykodisc CD), which she revised and published in a longer version as a children’s chapter book by Charlesbridge as The Golden Dreydl in 2007. In 2008, Vital Theatre in New York City commissioned her to script a fullscale theatrical version. “The Klezmer Nutcracker” played to sold-out audiences, with Kushner in the role of the magical Tante Miriam, throughout the 2008-09 holiday season. The 2009-10 holiday season features an all-new production of “The Klezmer Nutcracker” at Vital.

New projects include The Witches of Lublin, a live staged radio show with Elizabeth Schwartz & Yale Strom, and a musical, The Bone Chandelier, with composer Ben Moore. She is the co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, an organization supporting work that falls between genre categories. She now lives in New York City.