Cecilia Tan
Encyclopedia
Cecilia Tan is a writer, editor, sexuality activist, and founder of Circlet Press
, the first press devoted primarily to erotic science fiction
and fantasy
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
. She is the director of media relations for the New England Leather Alliance. She also writes about baseball
, but is not to be confused with a writer of the same name who specializes in Asian cookbooks.
Tan's first professional writing began when she was a teenager and wrote a monthly column for Superteen magazine and also wrote features for Teen Machine, two popular teen titles published by the conglomerate Sterling's Magazines. Her aspiration was to be a science fiction writer, and she idolized Roger Zelazny
, Marion Zimmer Bradley
, and Ray Bradbury
. She attended Brown University
and received her BA in linguistics
and cognitive science
in 1989.
Shortly thereafter, she took a job at Beacon Press
in Boston. At the same time, she discovered the leather community
via the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage and the science fiction/fantasy fan
community through conventions
like Arisia
and Gaylaxicon
. She was one of a cabal of five conspirators who began hosting BDSM play parties
at science fiction conventions (known as "asb parties" after the newsgroup). The first one was at the July 1991 Gaylaxicon in Tewksbury, Massachusetts
, followed soon after by a party at Philcon
in November that drew hundreds of participants. Later, other eager fans took up the duties and Tan ceased hosting these parties.
alt.sex.bondage was also the first place Tan published her erotic science fiction writing, posting stories and vignettes with some regularity in 1991 and 1992.
By 1992 she decided to leave her job at Beacon Press to pursue a master's degree in writing at Emerson College
. On her final day of work at Beacon, she returned home to find her first acceptance letter for the publication of a story waiting in her mailbox. It was for the story "A True Story", which was accepted into the anthology Herotica 4.
While in graduate school, Tan had plenty of time to keep her hand in publishing, with her own small press, Circlet Press
, Inc. Circlet's first book was a chapbook
of Tan's erotic science fiction stories, entitled Telepaths Don't Need Safewords. Mate by Lauren P. Burka soon followed, as did a host of small anthologies like SexMagick, TechnoSex, and Worlds of Women. Tan received her master's in Professional Writing and Publishing in 1994 from Emerson and devoted herself to writing and running Circlet Press full-time thereafter.
As of June 2009, Circlet Press has published over fifty titles, most of them erotic science fiction with occasional forays into related genres.
Tan herself has had her work published in a variety of outlets. Her stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine
, Penthouse
, Asimov's Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude
, Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Nerve.com, and many, many other places. Her collection of short stories, Black Feathers, appeared in 1998 from HarperCollins
. A follow-up collection of erotic short stories, White Flames, was published in 2008 by Running Press
. Tan moved into writing erotic romance ebooks in 2009 with the publications of Mind Games and The Hot Streak from Ravenous Romance. Her erotic romance novel series known as the Magic University series was published in ebook form by Ravenous Romance and in trade paperback by Red Silk Editions, an imprint of Red Wheel Weiser. (Unfortunately Weiser killed the imprint after the demise of the Borders bookstore chain and so only two of the four books in the series appeared in Red Silk Editions.) The Magic University series is also being published in France. In recent years Tan has been the recipient of various awards. In 2010 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame for GLBTQ writers at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. That same year her online serial, Daron's Guitar Chronicles, won the inaugural Rose and Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction. As of 2011, her books have been multiply nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and NLA Writing Awards, though she has not yet won one.
Her baseball works include The 50 Greatest Yankee Games (Wiley
, 2005) and The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games (Wiley, 2006, co-authored with Bill Nowlin), she formerly wrote weekly columns for GothamBaseball.com and YankeesXtreme.com and occasional articles for Yankees Magazine, and she continues to produce the online baseball magazine Why I Like Baseball. In 2004 she won an award for baseball research at the national SABR Convention, the USA Today
Sports Weekly award for best poster presentation for her work entitled, "The Women's Baseball Marathon". She has been editing the Maple Street Press Yankees Annual since 2007. In 2011, Tan became the publications director for the Society for American Baseball Research
and co-editor of the Baseball Prospectus
Annual with King Kaufman
.
Tan played baseball in a women's league in Pawtucket, Rhode Island
known as the Pawtucket Slaterettes, but retired after the 2007 season. She has also holds a black belt
in tae kwon do, receiving her second degree (dan) in June 2009, and is a certified technician in Okazaki Restorative Massage
.
Circlet Press
Circlet Press is a Cambridge, Massachusetts publishing house founded and managed by Cecilia Tan. It specializes in science fiction erotica, a once uncommon genre, and its publications often feature BDSM themes....
, the first press devoted primarily to erotic science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
and fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. She is the director of media relations for the New England Leather Alliance. She also writes about baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
, but is not to be confused with a writer of the same name who specializes in Asian cookbooks.
Tan's first professional writing began when she was a teenager and wrote a monthly column for Superteen magazine and also wrote features for Teen Machine, two popular teen titles published by the conglomerate Sterling's Magazines. Her aspiration was to be a science fiction writer, and she idolized Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for his The Chronicles of Amber series...
, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley was an American author of fantasy novels such as The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. Many critics have noted a feminist perspective in her writing. Her first child, David R...
, and Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
. She attended Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
and received her BA in linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
in 1989.
Shortly thereafter, she took a job at Beacon Press
Beacon Press
Beacon Press is an American non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association.Beacon Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses....
in Boston. At the same time, she discovered the leather community
Leather subculture
The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures...
via the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage and the science fiction/fantasy fan
Fandom
Fandom is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest...
community through conventions
Science fiction convention
Science fiction conventions are gatherings of fans of various forms of speculative fiction including science fiction and fantasy. Historically, science fiction conventions had focused primarily on literature, but the purview of many extends to such other avenues of expression as movies and...
like Arisia
Arisia
Arisia is a Boston-area science fiction convention, named for a planet in the Lensman novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith. The name was chosen as an homage to an older Boston-area con, Boskone, which took the typical ending for a convention—con—and then altered the spelling to match the name of an...
and Gaylaxicon
Gaylaxicon
Gaylaxicon is an annual science fiction, fantasy and horror convention that focuses on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender topics. It takes place in various locations in the United States and occasionally Canada, often on the east coast....
. She was one of a cabal of five conspirators who began hosting BDSM play parties
Play party (BDSM)
In BDSM, a play party is also a social event in which people practice BDSM and socialize with like-minded people. The organizers often provide some large pieces equipment to which people can be tied while the party goers usually bring their own whips, canes, restraints etc....
at science fiction conventions (known as "asb parties" after the newsgroup). The first one was at the July 1991 Gaylaxicon in Tewksbury, Massachusetts
Tewksbury, Massachusetts
Tewksbury is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 28,961 at the 2010 census.- History :Tewksbury was first settled in 1637 and was officially incorporated in 1734 from Billerica. Like Tewksbury Township, New Jersey, it is named after the town of Tewkesbury,...
, followed soon after by a party at Philcon
Philcon
Philcon, also known as the "Philadelphia Science Fiction Conference", is an annual science fiction convention, which has been held in or near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, nearly every year since 1936. The convention is run by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society...
in November that drew hundreds of participants. Later, other eager fans took up the duties and Tan ceased hosting these parties.
alt.sex.bondage was also the first place Tan published her erotic science fiction writing, posting stories and vignettes with some regularity in 1991 and 1992.
By 1992 she decided to leave her job at Beacon Press to pursue a master's degree in writing at Emerson College
Emerson College
Emerson College is a private coeducational university located in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of oratory," Emerson is "the only comprehensive college or university in America dedicated exclusively to communication and the arts in a liberal arts...
. On her final day of work at Beacon, she returned home to find her first acceptance letter for the publication of a story waiting in her mailbox. It was for the story "A True Story", which was accepted into the anthology Herotica 4.
While in graduate school, Tan had plenty of time to keep her hand in publishing, with her own small press, Circlet Press
Circlet Press
Circlet Press is a Cambridge, Massachusetts publishing house founded and managed by Cecilia Tan. It specializes in science fiction erotica, a once uncommon genre, and its publications often feature BDSM themes....
, Inc. Circlet's first book was a chapbook
Chapbook
A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...
of Tan's erotic science fiction stories, entitled Telepaths Don't Need Safewords. Mate by Lauren P. Burka soon followed, as did a host of small anthologies like SexMagick, TechnoSex, and Worlds of Women. Tan received her master's in Professional Writing and Publishing in 1994 from Emerson and devoted herself to writing and running Circlet Press full-time thereafter.
As of June 2009, Circlet Press has published over fifty titles, most of them erotic science fiction with occasional forays into related genres.
Tan herself has had her work published in a variety of outlets. Her stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine
Ms. magazine
Ms. is an American feminist magazine co-founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem and founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin together with founding editors Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock, that first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine...
, Penthouse
Penthouse (magazine)
Penthouse, a men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione, combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographic pictorials that, in the 1990s, evolved into hardcore. Penthouse is owned by FriendFinder Network. formerly known as General Media, Inc. whose parent company was Penthouse International...
, Asimov's Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude
Absolute magnitude
Absolute magnitude is the measure of a celestial object's intrinsic brightness. it is also the apparent magnitude a star would have if it were 32.6 light years away from Earth...
, Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Nerve.com, and many, many other places. Her collection of short stories, Black Feathers, appeared in 1998 from HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
. A follow-up collection of erotic short stories, White Flames, was published in 2008 by Running Press
Running Press
The Running Press is a member of the Perseus Books Group, the imprint is the publisher of fiction, non-fiction, cooking, humor, and kit books. The publisher's offices are located in Philadelphia, but many of the corporate functions take place in New York City....
. Tan moved into writing erotic romance ebooks in 2009 with the publications of Mind Games and The Hot Streak from Ravenous Romance. Her erotic romance novel series known as the Magic University series was published in ebook form by Ravenous Romance and in trade paperback by Red Silk Editions, an imprint of Red Wheel Weiser. (Unfortunately Weiser killed the imprint after the demise of the Borders bookstore chain and so only two of the four books in the series appeared in Red Silk Editions.) The Magic University series is also being published in France. In recent years Tan has been the recipient of various awards. In 2010 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame for GLBTQ writers at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. That same year her online serial, Daron's Guitar Chronicles, won the inaugural Rose and Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction. As of 2011, her books have been multiply nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and NLA Writing Awards, though she has not yet won one.
Her baseball works include The 50 Greatest Yankee Games (Wiley
John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and...
, 2005) and The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games (Wiley, 2006, co-authored with Bill Nowlin), she formerly wrote weekly columns for GothamBaseball.com and YankeesXtreme.com and occasional articles for Yankees Magazine, and she continues to produce the online baseball magazine Why I Like Baseball. In 2004 she won an award for baseball research at the national SABR Convention, the USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
Sports Weekly award for best poster presentation for her work entitled, "The Women's Baseball Marathon". She has been editing the Maple Street Press Yankees Annual since 2007. In 2011, Tan became the publications director for the Society for American Baseball Research
Society for American Baseball Research
The Society for American Baseball Research was established in Cooperstown, New York, in August 1971 by Bob Davids of Washington, D.C. The Society's mission is to foster the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball, while generating interest in the game...
and co-editor of the Baseball Prospectus
Baseball Prospectus
Baseball Prospectus is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well player and team performance projections on the site...
Annual with King Kaufman
King Kaufman
King Kaufman is the current writing program manager at Bleacher Report and former daily sports columnist for Salon.com. Kaufman grew up in Los Angeles, lived for six years in St. Louis, and moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2007...
.
Tan played baseball in a women's league in Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Pawtucket is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 71,148 at the 2010 census. It is the fourth largest city in the state.-History:...
known as the Pawtucket Slaterettes, but retired after the 2007 season. She has also holds a black belt
Black belt (martial arts)
In martial arts, the black belt is a way to describe a graduate of a field where a practitioner's level is often marked by the color of the belt. The black belt is commonly the highest belt color used and denotes a degree of competence. It is often associated with a teaching grade though...
in tae kwon do, receiving her second degree (dan) in June 2009, and is a certified technician in Okazaki Restorative Massage
Massage
Massage is the manipulation of superficial and deeper layers of muscle and connective tissue to enhance function, aid in the healing process, and promote relaxation and well-being. The word comes from the French massage "friction of kneading", or from Arabic massa meaning "to touch, feel or handle"...
.
External links
- Cecilia Tan's Homepage
- Circlet Press homepage
- New Bedfellows: Sex & Science Fiction, a dialogue between M. ChristianM. ChristianM. Christian is an author and anthologist working in a variety of genres including horror, science fiction, erotica and crime. Much of his work combines sexual themes with the horror or science fiction genre.-Selected bibliography:Among his works are:...
and Cecilia Tan - SceneProfiles Interview, by Sensuous Sadie
- Strange Horizons Interview, by Mary Anne MohanrajMary Anne MohanrajMary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth.- Background :Mohanraj was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka but moved to the United States at the age of two and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut. She attended Miss Porter's School and the University of...
- Mind Caviar Interview, by Jamie Joy Gatto
- Ms. Magazine The "pick three books" featurette
- SABR Award Press Release
- Interview from Hyphen Magazine by Claire Light
- Alternet column/interview by Annalee NewitzAnnalee NewitzAnnalee Newitz is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology. She received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and in 1997 published the widely cited book, White Trash: Race and Class in America. From 2004–2005 she was a policy analyst...
- Nerve.com essay
- Interview with Michael A. VentrellaMichael A. VentrellaMichael A. Ventrella founded Animato! in the mid 80s. He sold it in the early 90s. Under the pseudonym "Thelma Scumm" he wrote the gossip column and later continued that for fps magazine...
, May 2010