Joanna Russ - Biography

Joanna Russ is an important figure in both feminist SF and New Wave SF; her work is notable for strong feminist messages, stylistic and narrative innovations, and revisions of the SF genre.

Russ was born on February 22, 1937 and was raised in the Bronx. Her first published science fiction story, "Nor Custom Stale," appeared in 1959 when she was 22 years old, just two years after she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English. In 1960 she graduated from the Yale School of Drama with an MFA in playwriting and dramatic literature. She did not pursue a career as a playwright, but rather continued to write science fiction. She said in an interview, "I did not choose s.f. at all. I had always loved it. I read it because horror stories and s.f. seemed to me, from the age of 11-12 on, to be about real life in a way that the Classics we were assigned at school were not." ("Reflections on Science Fiction")

Russ has taught creative writing, literature, and speech at various universities in the United States. In 1987 she began to feel the effects of Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome; by 1990, she was too ill to teach, and she quit her teaching post at the University of Washington in Seattle. She moved to Tucson, Arizona, where in spite of CFIDS and chronic back pain, she finished her "giant book," What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race Class and the Future of Feminism, the result of 13 years of thinking about the intersections between socialist feminist theory and anti-racist theory. What Are We Fighting For? will be published by St. Martin's Press in 1997. Her critical and theoretical writing is remarkable for its accessibility. In addition to writing feminist theory, Russ has been an outspoken feminist and lesbian activist.

Russ has received a number of prestigious awards, including the Nebula Award for "When It Changed" (1972), the Hugo Award and the Locus Award for "Souls" (1983), and the Florence Howe Criticism Award for "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write."


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©1996 Julie Linden and Jeanne Cortiel

Last modified: 10/16/96