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Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan and brought up in New York, New York. She spent much of her early life at one end of a classroom or another, first at Vassar College and Brown University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and then at Boston University and Northeastern, where she taught Expository Writing and Fantasy as Literature.
This life of reading and teaching led, as it often does, to committing Fiction on her own account. She began with short stories, then moved up through novellas to her first novel, the Queer/Chaucerian fantasy Through a Brazen Mirror (1988). Her second novel, The Porcelain Dove (1992), an Interstitial work best described as a romantical-fantastical-historical comedy, was awarded the Mythopoeic Award. The Fall of the Kings, an Interstitial historical-academic-mythic tragedy set in an invented city, was written in collaboration with partner Ellen Kushner and published in 2002. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and has been translated into French, Italian, and Japanese. She has also contributed stories to a number of young people's anthologies, most recently Coyote Road (2007) and Troll's Eye View (2009). She has written two novels for younger readers: Changeling (2006) and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen (2009), which are set in an alternate New York populated by all the fairies and folklore the mortal immigrants brought with them when they came here.
In 1995, she finally abandoned the fading groves of academe and put her skills to good use as a contributing editor for Tor Books and co-editor on the fantasy anthologies The Horns of Elfland (with Ellen Kushner) and The Essential Bordertown (with Terri Windling), as well as Interfictions 1 (with Theodora Goss) and Interficitons 2 (with Christopher Barzak). But she still misses the classroom, and has served on the faculty of the Clarion and Odyssey Science Fiction and Fantasy workshops, as well as teaching and lecturing at writing workshops all over the country.
Sherman shares a sprawling Upper West Side apartment in New York City with Ellen Kushner and piles of books and papers. She loves airplanes, hotels, and unfamiliar places, gardening, and researching in brick-and-mortar libraries. She looks upon the country as a nice place to visit, but she is unable to contemplate life without cafés (where would she write?) and public transportation (she hates to drive).
More about Sherman can be found at deliasherman.com. Her essay "An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border" can also be found on this website.
