Carol Emshwiller

She was married to the artist and experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller and "regularly served as his model for paintings of beautiful women." The couple had three children: Eve Emshwiller, a botanist and ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Susan Emshwiller, author and co-screenwriter of the movie Pollock; and Peter Emshwiller, an actor, artist, screenwriter, and novelist.

• Name — Carol Emshwiller • Birth Name — Carol Fries • Born — 12 April 1921 • Birthplace — Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. • Died — 2 February 2019 • Place of death — Durham, North Carolina, U.S. • Education — University of Michigan • Occupation — Writer • Genre — science fiction, magical realism • Illustration — Teaching at Clarion West, 1998.

Emshwiller was born Agnes Carolyn Fries in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She spent part of her childhood in France and Germany for her father's academic sabbaticals. After graduating with a B.A. in music from the University of Michigan in 1945, she joined the Red Cross to aid U.S. troops in postwar Italy. Returning to Ann Arbor, she attended art school and married Ed Emshwiller, a fellow art student, in 1949. The couple studied at the École Nationale Superiéure des Beaux-Arts, toured Europe on a motorcycle, and eventually settled in Levittown, New York. In later years, she lived in New York City and taught at New York University. She spent summers in Owens Valley, California, a setting she often used in her stories. She died on February 2, 2019, in Durham, North Carolina, where she was living with her daughter, Susan.

Emshwiller began publishing science fiction in the mid-1950s. Much of her early fiction appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies. Her experimental stories were associated with the New Wave of science fiction. Emshwiller’s stories appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ninth Letter, Century, Scifiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, McSweeney’s, Orbit, Epoch, The Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, and many other anthologies and magazines. Emshwiller was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and was awarded an NEA grant, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant, a New York State Foundation for the Arts grant, and the ACCENT/ASCENT fiction prize. In 1991, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award—Collection for The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories. In 2005, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Her short story "Creature" won the 2002 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and "I Live With You" won the 2005 Nebula Award in the same category. In 2009, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

• Carmen Dog (The Women's Press, 1988; Mercury House, 1990) • Ledoyt (Mercury House, 1995) • Leaping Man Hill (Mercury House, 1999) • The Mount (Small Beer Press, 2002) • Mister Boots (Viking Juvenile, 2005) • The Secret City (Tachyon Publications, 2007)

• Joy in Our Cause (Harper & Row, 1974) • Verging on the Pertinent (Coffee House Press, 1989) • The Start of the End of It All (The Women's Press/Mercury House, 1990). Winner of the World Fantasy Award, Best Collection • Venus Rising (Edgewood Press, 1992) • Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2002) • I Live With You (Tachyon Publications, 2005) • In the Time of War and Other Stories of Conflict / Master of the Road to Nowhere and Other Tales of the Fantastic (P.S. Publishing, 2011) (omnibus edition) • The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller (Nonstop Press, 2011) • The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller: Vol. 2 (Nonstop Press, 2014) • Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, ed. Matthew Cheney (Third Man Books, 2025)