• An anthology of "Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer" speculative fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead, whose debut novel Jonny Appleseed won the Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction in 2019. Jonny Appleseed was also shortlisted for the Firecracker Award for Fiction in the US and the Governor General's Literary Award in Canada, and was longlisted for the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
• In addition to being an acclaimed writer, Joshua is an academic, nearing completion of a PhD in English at the University of Calgary specializing in Indigenous literary studies. He also works regularly to amplify the work of other Indigenous writers, especially queer ones, the results of which include this anthology.
• In Joshua's own words: "I wanted contributors to think about the utopic, in whatever form that may take with each writer, in Indigenous speculative fiction so as to give it a political and hopeful tenet that details trauma but doesn't glorify it for the sake of settler consumption. Furthermore, with the rise in popularization of Indigenous literature, and, more specifically, 2SQ Indigenous literatures, the work of genre is an important one in helping to raise Indigenous literatures out of the vein of the dystopian (fantastical or literal) that often details and hones in on the traumas of residential schools -- an important topic nonetheless but an overburdened one."
• Love after the End is not the first Indigenous science fiction anthology -- there was one published in 2012 entitled Walking the Clouds (University of Arizona Press)--- nor is it the first queer Indigenous anthology, which was Love Beyond Body, Space and Time, published in 2016 by the small Canadian publisher Bedside Press. However, Love after the End is being published in a new era, in which Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer writers can fully embrace their queerness and Indigeneity.
• The contributors are a mix of Americans (4) and Canadians (5); US contributors are Mari Kurisato (Ojibwe; residence: Denver), Darcie Little Badger (Apache; residence: Texas and Minnesota), Nazbah Tom (Diné: former residence: Arizona), and Kai Minosh Pyle (Métis and Baawiting Nishnaabe; residence: Green Bay, WI).
• Advance blurbs forthcoming from Vivek Shraya, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cherie Dimaline and Eden Robinson.
