Nisi Shawl is an African American writer, editor, and journalist. She is best known for her science fiction and fantasy stories and novels dealing with race, gender, and sexual orientation. She lives in Seattle, where she also writes on political and cultural matters for the Seattle Times. Even before Shawl's steampunk-flavored alternate history of the "Belgian" Congo, Everfair, took the sci-fi world by storm, her short stories had already established her as a cutting-edge black writer whose politically charged fiction is in the grand feminist tradition of Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Joanna Russ.