Rivers Solomon


Rivers Solomon is an American author of the 2017 science fiction novel An Unkindness of Ghosts and Sorrowland which is set to be published in 2021. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction for their debut novel and were nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the debut novel category.

Personal life

As of 2018, Solomon lives in Cambridge, UK, with their family. Originally from the United States, they received their BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University in California and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. They grew up in California, Indiana, Texas, and New York. Their literary influences include Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Jean Toomer, and Doris Lessing. Rivers Solomon uses the pronouns they/them.

Work

wrote of An Unkindness of Ghosts, "Reading it, I felt it carving out a vastness inside me, pouring itself into me like so many stars, and the more I read the bigger I felt, falling down a rabbit-hole of sky and wanting only to go deeper and farther with every page." Gary K. Wolfe opined "All this might make An Unkindness of Ghosts sound like a programmatic slavery allegory dressed in generation starship trappings, but Solomon’s evocation of this society is so sharply detailed and viscerally realized, the characters so closely observed, the individual scenes so tightly structured, that the novel achieves surprising power and occasional brilliance."
In January 2020, Stormzy announced that his #Merky Books imprint would be publishing Solomon's Sorrowland in 2021.