About Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan.
She currently lives in Ohio with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.
Her work in poetry and short fiction can be found online and in print in such journals as The Pedestal Magazine, Fantastic Metropolis, The Journal of Mythic Arts, Clarkesworld Magazine, Jabberwocky, Mythic Delirium, Lone Star Stories, Fantasy Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Cabinet des Fees, and Star*Line, and anthologies such as Interfictions, The Book of Voices, Salon Fantastique, The Minotaur in Pamplona, and featured in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #18. She received a Special Commendation for Service in the Arts from California State University in 2003. Her story Urchins, While Swimming, received the Million Writers Award for best online short fiction in 2006.
Her first chapbook, Music of a Proto-Suicide, was released in the winter of 2004.
Her critical series on feminine archetypes in Greek and Roman drama has appeared in successive issues of the International Journal of the Humanities.
Her first novel, The Labyrinth, was published by Prime Books in 2004, and her second, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, was released in the summer of 2005. Her third novel, The Grass-Cutting Sword, came out in the summer of 2006. Under the Aegis imprint, Prime has also published two collections of her poetry, Apocrypha, and Oracles.
Her third volume of poetry, The Descent of Inanna, was published by Papaveria Press early in 2006. A chapbook and further long-form poems are forthcoming from this innovative micropress.
Her fourth major project, a duology of original fairy tales, The Orphan's Tales, is currently in progress. Volume I, In the Night Garden, was released by Bantam Spectra on Halloween 2006. It received the James Tiptree Jr. Award for the expansion of gender and sexuality in speculative fiction and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Volume II, I n the Cities of Coin and Spice, will come out in the fall of 2007.