Jessica Salmonson papers

Jessica Salmonson was born January 6, 1950 in Seattle, Washington. She spent her early childhood with her parents, who worked in a traveling carnival - her mother as a sword eater, and step-father as a fire breather. Sadly, she was orphaned at the age of seven, and spent several years in a foster home with her older sister. She ran away when she was twelve, and was subsequently placed in group homes, before regaining contact with her father and his new wife, Lek, a Thai Buddhist nun.

Salmonson's writing career began in the early 1970’s, with her work as an editor and writer for a small press magazine, The Literary Magazine of Fantasy and Terror. Salmonson used her role at the magazine, which served as a forum for feminist issues, to openly document and discuss her gender transition. In 1985, Salmonson left the Literary Magazine of Fantasy and Terror to work as the editor for the literary zine Fantasy Macabre (1985- 1997).

Salmonson's first significant publication - Amazons! - won the 1980 World Fantasy Award. Just a year later, her work Tomoe Gozen - the first of a trilogy - was published to acclaim (a revised version of the novel, re-titled The Disfavored Hero, was published in 1999). In 1989, she won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Science Fiction/Fantasy, for her editorial work on the anthrology What Did Miss Darrington See?: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction.Salmonson's story collections include A Silver Thread of Madness (1989); The Mysterious Doom and Other Ghostly Tales of the Pacific Northwest (1992); Phantom Waters: Northwest Legends of Rivers, Lakes, and Shores (1995); and The Eleventh Jaguarandi and Other Mysterious Persons (coll 1995).

Her works of poetry include: The Black Crusader and Other Poems of Horror (1979, chap); Cheap Present (1980, chap); On the Shores of Eternity (1981, chap); Feigned Death and Other Sorceries (1983, chap); Innocent of Evil: Poems in Prose (1984, chap); The Patient Child (1985, chap); Fantasies in Black and White (1987, chap); A Celestial Occurrence (1991, chap); The Goddess Under Siege (1992, chap); Songs of the Maenads (1993, chap); The Horn of Tara (1995, chap); and Lake of the Devil: Poems of Morosity and Jest (1995, chap).

Salmonson lives in the Pacific Northwest.

[source: Clute, John and John Grant. Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan: 1997.]