Nancy Kress lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband, Charles Sheffield. In 1990, she wrote her first science fiction novella, Beggars in Spain. She has earned her Masters degrees in education and english from State University of New York, Brockport and taught there occassionally between 1984 and 1990. Nancy started her writing career in the fantasy genre but now produces science fiction, usually about genetic engineering. She regularly serves as a teacher and mentor of aspiring science fiction writers at summer conferences such as Clarion and at the Bethesda Writing Center during the rest of the year. She writes the "Fiction" column for Writer's Digest magazine. "She has won two Nebulas and a Hugo, and lost over a dozen more of these awards."

Nancy advises novice writers that the best point of view is,

"...usually third person limited--limited to one character. This is easiest because there's only one character to keep track of. You don't have to be inside his head or reproduce his diction the way you would in first person. You can use standard English.

'Third person limited' means limited to one character, 'third person multiple,' to more than one. You're limited to only what he, she, or they see. Each point of view also has distance: close, distant, or omniscient."

Nancy Kress is the author of fourteen books: three fantasy novels, six SF novels, two thrillers, two collections of short stories, and two books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the "Sleepless" trilogy that began with BEGGARS IN SPAIN. Her most recent book is STINGER (Tor). Kress's short fiction has appeared in all the usual places, including Omni, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and Analog. She has won three Nebulas: in 1985 for Out Of All Them Bright Stars, in 1991 for the novella version of Beggars In Spain, which also won a Hugo, and in 1998 for The Flowers of Aulit Prison.


BOOKS

Short Fiction

[Editor's Note (Gz): added several links 5/27/2002.]