Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month (2010). Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Books and on Tor.com. She became the Otherworldly columnist at the New York Times in February 2018, and is represented by DongWon Song of HMLA.
Amal has written stories about maps, bird women, book women, the Arabic alphabet, singing fish, Damascene dream-crafters, sentient diamond oceans and pockets that are bigger on the inside. Her story “Seasons of Glass and Iron” won the Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards in 2017, while her stories “The Green Book” and “Madeleine” were finalists for the Nebula Award in 2011 and 2015 respectively, and “The Truth About Owls” won the Locus Award in 2015.
Her poems “Song for an Ancient City”, “Peach-Creamed Honey,” and “Turning the Leaves” won the Rhysling award for Best Short Poem in 2009, 2011 and 2014 respectively, and in 2012 she received the Richard Jefferies Poetry Prize for “Phase Shifting.” In her (few) hours of rest she drinks tea, lifts weights, plays harp, and writes letters to her friends by hand.
Amal frequents Twitter, where she is often very silly.
Panels: A Seriously Folked Up Panel on Fairy Tales, Dissecting the B-Movie, Odysseys: Old Worlds in New Words, Using Your Words Shouldn’t Be Boring