Catherynne M. Valente

Career

Valente's 2009 book Palimpsest won the Lambda Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror. Her two-volume series The Orphan's Tales won the 2008 Mythopoeic Award, and its first volume, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, won the 2006 James Tiptree Jr. Award and was nominated for the 2007 World Fantasy Award. In 2012, Valente won three Locus Awards: Best Novelette (White Lines on a Green Field), Best Novella (Silently and Very Fast) and Best YA Novel (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making).

In 2009, she donated her archive to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Collection in the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

She is a regular panelist on the podcast SF Squeecast.

Multimedia and mythpunk

Valente tours with singer/songwriter S. J. Tucker, who has composed albums based on Valente's work. The pair perform reading concerts featuring dancers, aerial artists, art auctions featuring jewelry and paintings based on the novels, and other performances.

Valente is active in the crowdfunding movement of online artists. Her novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making was the first online, crowdfunded book to win a major literary award before traditional publication.

In a 2006 blog post, Valente coined the term mythpunk as a joke for describing her own and other works of challenging folklore-based fantasy. Valente and other critics and writers have discussed mythpunk as a subgenre of mythic fiction that starts in folklore and myth and adds elements of postmodernist literary techniques.