Biography

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City, with occasional visits to her mother's relatives in Texas and Louisiana and her father's relatives in South Carolina. Much of her early life was spent at one end of a classroom or another, including Brown University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies in 1981, and Boston and Northeastern Universities, where she taught Freshman Composition and Fantasy as Literature until she realized she'd rather edit and write. Pursuing her love of history and travel, she has set novels and short stories for children and adults in many times and places.

Her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror (Ace, 1989), was an Ace Fantasy Special. In 1990, she was nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer. Her second novel, The Porcelain Dove (Dutton, 1993; Plume, 1994), won the Mythopoeic Award. She made her debut in the world of children's literature with short stories in The Green Man and Faery Reel (edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow) and Firebirds (Viking, 2003). Most recently, she has contributed to the YA anthologies The Beastly Bride, Steampunk! and Teeth. Her novels for children include Changeling (Viking, 2006) and The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen (Viking, 2009), set in an alternate, magical New York, and The Freedom Maze (Big Mouth House, November 2011), a time-travel novel set in antebellum Louisiana.

Delia has served on the Motherboard of the James Tiptree Jr. Award and is a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. She has served on juries for the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, the Tiptree Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

As a freelance editor, Delia's continuing quest is to get more of the kind of fantasy she likes out to readers. She has been a contributing editor for Tor Books and has co-edited, with Ellen Kushner and Donald G. Keller, the fantasy anthology The Horns of Elfland (Roc, 1997) as well as the Bordertown punk-elf anthology The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling. She edited Interficitons: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (Small Beer Press, 2007) with Theodora Goss and Interfictions 2 with Christopher Barzak (SBP, 2009). She teaches SF and Fantasy writing at the Odyssey and Clarion workshops, and the Graduate Program in Children's Literature at Hollins University.

Delia lives with fellow author Ellen Kushner in a rambling apartment in New York City. She is a social rather than a solitary writer, and can work anywhere, which is a good thing because she loves to travel, and if she couldn't write on airplanes, she'd never get anything done.