Cecilia Tan Biographical Data
Various official "bios" for publication purposes.
Short and generic:
Cecilia Tan writes about her many passions, from erotic fantasy to baseball, from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of Black Feathers, White Flames, and The 50 Greatest Yankee Games. She has edited over 50 anthologies of erotica for Thunder's Mouth Press, Blue Moon Books, Masquerade Books, and for the publishing house she founded, Circlet Press. Her fiction has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, Best American Erotica, and many other places, and her nonfiction on baseball has been in Slow Trains, Baseball Ink, Gotham Baseball Magazine, and elsewhere.
Short "erotica and sex" version:
Cecilia Tan is a writer, editor, and sexuality activist. She is the author of White Flames, Edge Plays, Black Feathers, The Velderet, and Telepaths Don't Need Safewords. She has the distinction of being perhaps the only writer to have erotic fiction published in both Penthouse and Ms. magazines, as well as in scores of other magazines and anthologies. She is the founder and editor of Circlet Press, publishers of erotic science fiction and fantasy. She is also the Media Relations Director for the New England Leather Alliance. Learn more at www.ceciliatan.com.
Long "erotica and sex" version:
"Cecilia Tan transcends time, space, gravity, and cultural norms in her line of work: erotic science fiction," according to the San Francisco Weekly. Susie Bright calls her " simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature." Tan always considered herself a writer, but her career took off in 1992 when she self-published a chapbook of three kinky science fiction stories entitled Telepaths Don't Need Safewords--and thus Circlet Press was born. Since that time she has written four more books of erotica, Black Feathers (HarperCollins, 1998), The Velderet (Circlet, 2001), Edge Plays (EAA E-book, 2006), and White Flames (Running Press, 2008). She has also edited numerous erotica anthologies including Sex In The System (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006), The MILF Anthology (Blue Moon Books, 2005), Cowboy Lover (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007), and many, many others, in cludnig over forty anthologies for Circlet Press. Her stories, essays, and articles in have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies including Best America Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Women's Erotica, Playboy Online, The Mammoth Book of New Erotica, On A Bed of Rice, Dark Angels, Penthouse, Ms. magazine, Asimov's, Nerve, Gothic.net, Fenway Fiction, Periphery, and many more.
Baseball writer version:
Cecilia Tan is the author of The 50 Greatest Yankee Games (Wiley, 2004) and is a senior writer at Gotham Baseball magazine. She edits the Maple Street Press annual publication Bombers Broadside: An Annual Look at the New York Yankees. Her baseball writings have appeared in Slow Trains, Baseball Ink, Baseball Savvy, Yankees Xtreme, Fenway Fiction, and elsewhere. She has also written and produced one of the Internet's oldest baseball journals, WhyILikeBaseball.com), since 2000.
And now, the informal stuff. If you really want biographical miscellany, check out my original online journal, which goes back to 1996, long before there were such things as "blogs," and which is now carried on at my LiveJournal.
So, who am I? I'm a writer, best
known for my erotic stories but I also write science fiction,
mainstream fiction, baseball nonfiction, and essays. (A complete list of
my publications is available if you want the gory details on what
I've done and what I have coming up...)
There are also the books I
have edited through the company I founded, Circlet Press erotic
science fiction and fantasy. I am the Media Relations Director for
the New England Chapter of the National Leather Association (also known as the NEW ENGLAND LEATHER ALLIANCE (NELA)),
and a member of Biversity (biversity-request@blank.org),
a mixed gender bisexuality activist group in Boston.
I travel
extensively doing readings, giving workshops, autographings, you name
it. I'm now trying to do all my event listings on BookTour.com.
When I am home, I practice TaeKwon Do at the Jae Hun Kim Tae Kwon Do Institute in Cambridge, MA.
In 1995 I bought a house with my long-term partner corwin, where we live with our two cats, Tai Gau and Varenka (aka Renki, aka Feline Calico Hughes, aka Miss Hughes, the Cat of Many Hues).
and I play the guitar, the flute, mandolin, and a bunch of other
things. For over 15 years I worked at King Richard's Faire in Carver, MA in the Fall,
where I played the flute and work in the Wind & Wood booth selling
wooden flutes for Billy Miller. Before going in to book publishing, I had previously
held jobs in a bird-feeder factory, as a radio disk jockey, and as a
cook's assistant. I was a professional ski instructor and I taught
mime and Spanish to elementary school kids. I was once a Girl Scout,
too.