March’s newsletter features programming news, chat announcements, an author spotlight on Ellen Kushner, and lots of exciting book news.

Congratulations to Hannah Berry, who won our giveaway for Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince!

We’ll have another giveaway next month to celebrate the release of Robin LaFevers’s Dark Triumph, the sequel to Grave Mercy.

Programming News
During the month of March, we’ll be posting our annual guide to programming on the Sirens LiveJournal. If you’d like to submit a programming proposal, or you’d like to know more about the kinds of programming we offer, these posts are a great place to get started.

The deadline for programming proposals is May 10, 2013.

See the guidelines section of our website for more information on putting a proposal together. If you have ideas for programming you’d like to see others present, share them with us at one of our brainstorming chats. If you’re curious about past programming, check out our archive.

Upcoming Chats
If you’re on Twitter, be sure to follow @sirens_con—we’ll be hosting a live Twitter Q&A on Friday, March 15th, 9:30-10 p.m. Eastern. Join some of the Sirens staff as we brainstorm programming ideas and answer your questions.

We’re also hosting two chats on our website to talk about programming ideas, travel plans, and the books we’ve been reading. Everyone is welcome! Please feel free to stop by for a minute or an hour.

Our chats are scheduled for:
Tuesday, March 26th, 9-10 p.m. Eastern
Sunday, April 7th, 2-3 p.m. Eastern

Author Spotlight: Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner’s career spans writing, editing, radio hosting, and performing. Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, which began her Riverside series, was hailed as the progenitor of the “Mannerpunk” (or “Fantasy of Manners”) school of urban fantasy. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won both the 1991 World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. With Delia Sherman she co-wrote The Fall of the Kings, and her most recent novel, The Privilege of the Sword, a genre-crossing, gender-bending novel published by Bantam Books and Small Beer Press, earned an eclectic range of honors from New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age to finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards, and won the Locus Award.

Among Ellen’s many other projects are Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black), an anthology of new stories set in Terri Windling’s seminal shared-world series, and The Witches of Lublin, a musical audio drama written with Elizabeth Schwartz & Yale Strom for public radio. Ellen is also the co-founder of The Interstitial Arts Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports work that exists between genres.

We are very excited to have Ellen Kushner as one of our guests of honor at Sirens this year, along with Alaya Dawn Johnson, Robin LaFevers, and Guadalupe Garcia McCall. If you’re new to their works, check out our reading list for a place to start.

What We’re Excited About This Month:

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson was released on March 1! The author answers questions on NPR’s First Reads series and appears on PW KidsCast (podcast).

Guadalupe Garcia McCall is on a winning streak.

Malinda Lo: A Year of Thinking About Diversity.

Jasmine Richard’s The Book of Wonders is featured on Day 18 of The Brown Bookshelf’s 28 Days Later initiative.

Uma Krishnaswami takes on Thumbelina.

Horror, fantasy, and Nnedi Okorafor — and the cover for Kabu Kabu (out in October).

Rosamund Hodge on Sundered.

An excerpt of Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson (out March 12).

“Kyra, a 16-year-old Master Potioner (specialty: poisonous weaponry) is on a mission to kill her best friend, Princess Ariana.” Poison by Bridget Zinn.

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, is out March 19.

Malinda Lo recommends five queer fairy tales.

Janni Lee Simner’s Faerie After (May 28) gets a website.

Ellen Kushner, Terri Windling, and Holly Black answer questions about Welcome to Bordertown.

Karen Healey (author of When We Wake) is doing a live chat with Malinda Lo (author of Adaptation) on March 23.

Do you have exciting book news for us? Send it to (help at sirensconference.org) by March 27th and we’ll include it in the next newsletter.

Until next time, happy reading!

Questions? You can comment here or write to us at (help at sirensconference.org).