Leslye Penelope is the award-winning author of the Earthsinger Chronicles. The first book in the series, Song of Blood & Stone, was chosen as one of TIME Magazine‘s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Her latest novel The Monsters We Defy won the 2023 Audie Award for Best Fantasy Audiobook. Equally left and right-brained, she studied filmmaking and computer science at Howard University and sometimes dreams in HTML. She hosts the My Imaginary Friends podcast and lives in Maryland with her husband and furry dependents. Sign up for her weekly newsletter for writers at myimaginaryfriends.net.
As a Black woman and a speculative fiction writer, I take Octavia E. Butler’s advice to write myself into my stories seriously. My first series, the Earthsinger Chronicles, takes place in a secondary fantasy world populated by people of all skin tones, much like our own. The themes of the series include racism and prejudice, as well as identity, love, freedom, and community. And like myself, the heroines I write about are Black.
