Joanna Russ

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Joanna Russ bigraphy, stories - Feminist science fiction writer and critic.

Joanna Russ : biography

February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011

Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women’s Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children’s book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire.

Selected bibliography

Novels
  • Picnic on Paradise (1968)
  • And Chaos Died (1970)
  • The Female Man (1975)
  • We Who Are About To… (1977)
  • The Two of Them (1978)
  • On Strike Against God (1980) (novella)
Short fiction collections
  • The Adventures of Alyx (1976) (includes Picnic on Paradise)
  • The Zanzibar Cat (1983)
  • Extra(ordinary) People (1985)
  • The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987)
Children’s fiction
  • Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978)
Play
  • "Window Dressing" in The New Women’s Theatre edited by Honor Moore. New York, Random House (1977)
Nonfiction collections
  • Speculations on the Subjunctivity of Science Fiction (1973)
  • Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic (1973)
  • How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983)
  • Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985)
  • To Write Like a Woman (1995)
  • What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997)
  • The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007)

Reputation and legacy

Her work is widely taught in courses on science fiction and feminism throughout the English speaking world. Russ is the subject of Farah Mendlesohn’s book On Joanna Russ and Jeanne Cortiel’s Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction. Russ and her work are prominently featured in Sarah LeFanu’s Chinks in the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988). In 2013 She was inducted into the SF Hall of Fame at the EMP in Seattle

Background

Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, New York CityRuss and Salmonson 1989, pg. 236 to Evarett I. and Bertha (née Zinner) Russ, both teachers. She began creating works of fiction at a very early age. Over the following years she filled countless notebooks with stories, poems, comics and illustrations, often hand-binding the material with thread.

As a senior in high school, Russ was selected as one of the top ten Westinghouse Science Talent Search Winners. She graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir NabokovDelany 2005, p. vi. in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960. After teaching at several universities, including Cornell, she became a full professor at the University of Washington.

Health problems

In her later life she published little, largely due to chronic back pain and chronic fatigue syndrome.

On April 27, 2011, it was reported that Russ had been admitted to a hospice after suffering a series of strokes. Samuel R. Delany was quoted as saying that Russ was “slipping away” and had long had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order on file.Silver, Steven H "Joanna Russ in Hospice" SF Site April 27, 2011 She died early in the morning on April 29, 2011."" Locus April 29, 2011.

Science fiction and other writing

Russ came to be noticed in the science fiction world in the late 1960s,Bacon-Smith 2000, p. 95. in particular for her award-nominated novel Picnic on Paradise. At the time, SF was a field dominated by male authors, writing for a predominantly male audience, but women were starting to enter the field in larger numbers. Russ, an out lesbian,Griffin 2002, pg. 172 was one of the most outspoken authors to challenge male dominance of the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers. She was also one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously. Over the course of her life, she published over fifty short stories.