Winner of the 2023 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology
Winner of the 2023 Locus Award for Best Anthology
A 2023 NAACP Image Award Nominee
A 2023 British Fantasy Award Nominee
A NPR Best of the Year pick
A Book Riot Best SFF of the Year pick
"[A] magnificent and wide-ranging anthology . . . A must-read for all genre fans."―Publishers Weekly, starred review
From award-winning editorial team Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight comes an anthology of thirty-two original stories showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora.
A group of cabinet ministers query a supercomputer containing the minds of the country’s ancestors. A child robot on a dying planet uncovers signs of fragile new life. A descendent of a rain goddess inherits her grandmother’s ability to change her appearance―and perhaps the world.
Created in the legacy of the seminal, award-winning anthology series Dark Matter, Africa Risen celebrates the vibrancy, diversity, and reach of African and Afro-Diasporic SFF and reaffirms that Africa is not rising―it’s already here.
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (2020) is her first all prose collection. She is the author of the Marvel novel adaptation of the legendary comics, Black Panther: Panther's Rage (2022). She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (2016), longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review, and Shotgun Lullabies (2011).
She edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction anthologies, Dark Matter (2000 and 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois's science fiction short stories. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage, 2020). She is the Associate Editor of the historic Black arts literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & the Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 and is the Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also writes book reviews for Asimov's.
She was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Special Award – Professional category for contributions to the genre and wa Co-Host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony at Discon III in Washington, DC with Malka Older. She is a Marvel writer and contributor to the groundbreaking anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an African speculative fiction writer and editor from Nigeria. He won the Nommo Award for best short story by an African in 2019, the 2020 Otherwise Award, and the HWA diversity grant. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, BSFA, BFA, Sturgeon, This Is Horror, and Nommo awards. He co-edited the
Dominion anthology, is guest editor at Interstellar Flight Press, and is the editor of the first ever Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction anthology. His written works have appeared and are forthcoming in
Tor.com, NBC,
Strange Horizons,
Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores,
Galaxy’s Edge and more.
Zelda Knight is a
USA Today bestselling author, British Fantasy Award-winning editor, and diverse bookseller. She writes speculative romance for all orientations. She’s also the publisher and editor-in-chief of Aurelia Leo, an independent Nebula Award-nominated press based in Louisville, Kentucky. Zelda co-edited
Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, which has received critical acclaim, and
Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction. Keep in touch on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Goodreads, or visit her website.
