Ellen Kushner

ellen Kushner is a renowned children’s fiction and fantasy author, best known for her Swords of Riverside series of novels. She has had a varied career as a public speaker, radio host, performer, teacher, and author. Kushner grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Barnard College before transferring to Bryn Mawr College. After college, she found work as a fiction editor in New York City but left soon after to pursue a career as a published author.

Kushner's debut novel, "Swordspoint," was published in 1987 and is considered the progenitor of the mannerpunk subgenre of urban fantasy. The novel became a cult classic and was followed by the award-winning single standing novel "Thomas the Rhymer" and two more titles in the "Riverside" series. Kushner's short stories have been featured in several anthologies and have been translated into multiple languages, including Japanese, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Latvian, and Finnish.

In addition to her writing, Kushner has had a successful career in radio. After moving to Boston, she became a radio host for WGBH-FM and created the award-winning national public radio series Sound & Spirit. She served as the host and writer of the program, which aired nationally until 2010 and can now be heard online. As a live stage performer, Kushner has created solo spoken word works and has written for the stage, including the Klezmer Nutcracker, which played to sold-out audiences in New York City.

Kushner has also worked in audiobooks, narrating and co-producing "illuminated" versions of her "Riverside" novels for Neil Gaiman Presents at Audible.com. She has won several awards for her audiobook narration, including a 2013 Audie Award for Swordspoint. In recent years, Kushner has worked on several collaborative projects, including the urban fantasy anthology Welcome to Bordertown and the online Riverside series prequel Tremontaine.

Kushner is a co-founder and past president of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, an organization that supports work that falls between genre categories. She regularly teaches writing at the prestigious Clarion Workshop and the Hollins University Graduate Program in Children’s Literature. Kushner is known for being a dauntless traveler and has been a guest of honor at conventions all over the world. She currently lives in New York City with her wife, author and educator Delia Sherman, and has no cats.