A 45-minute conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse, Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning author of Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts, the first two books in the Sixth World series, plus the Star Wars novel Resistance Reborn and the middle-grade novel Race to the Sun (Rick Riordan Presents), and multiple short stories. She won the Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer in 2018.

Websitewww.rebeccaroanhorse.com

Twitter@RoanhorseBex

Facebook@roanhorsebex

Rebecca Roanhorse’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer, and the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer. Her novel Trail of Lightning, book one in the Sixth World series, won the Locus Award for best first novel, and is a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy finalist. It was also selected as an Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Library Journal, and NPR Best Book of 2018, among others. Book two in the series, Storm of Locusts, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her newest novel, Resistance Reborn, is part of Star Wars: Journey to the Rise of Skywalker. Her middle-grade novel, Race to the Sun, for the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, will release in January 2020, and her epic fantasy novel Between Earth and Sky will follow in late 2020. Her short fiction can be found at Apex Magazine, New Suns, The Mythic Dream, and various other anthologies, and she also writes nonfiction, which can be found in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation, published by Macmillan. She lives in northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pups.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers, Rebecca.

Well, thank you for having me.

I always look for connections and we have a…we haven’t met, but you were born in Arkansas, lived in Texas, and went to university in New Mexico, and I was born in New Mexico, lived in Texas, and went to university in Arkansas. So there’s a certain…

Wow. Small world.

…although I live in Canada. Yeah, I was born in Silver City, New Mexico. My parents were living in a little town called Bayard down there, so…but didn’t live there very long.

Yeah. That is south and I’m in the north, but I know where it is.

So, let’s go back into the mists of time, as I like to say to my guests, and talk about where you grew up and how you got interested in writing and in speculative fiction in particular. Most of us start with reading, and I think from reading some of your other interviews that that was kind of the case for you, too.