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Gift Yourself A FIYAH Literary Magazine Subscription For 2020

Patricia Elzie-Tuttle

Contributing Editor

Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.

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I’m of the mind that it isn’t too early for me to start making plans for what I want 2020 to look like so I was really happy when FIYAH Literary Magazine tweeted this timely reminder on Friday to preorder a subscription:

If you’ve not heard of FIYAH, it is a “quarterly speculative fiction magazine that features stories by and about Black people of the African Diaspora.” What is speculative fiction? It’s an umbrella term for fiction that contains things not of this world. You like science fiction? You like fantasy? You like dystopian fiction? Those (and more) all fall under speculative fiction, also known as specfic.

FIYAH was a World Fantasy Awards winner in 2018 and a Hugo Awards finalist in 2019. The Founding Executive Editor was author (and former Rioter!) Justina Ireland and the current Executive Editor is author (and also former Rioter!) Troy L. Wiggins. As the tweet mentions, FIYAH pays its writers and artists and it needs subscribers in order to do that. They are about 300 subscriptions away from their goal to cover their 2020 operating costs.

I’m a huge fan of specfic, especially Black specfic, and I look forward to supporting a publication that pays its writers. I’m also super excited that I can not only buy myself a subscription, but I can buy gift subscriptions as well. It’s a great publication that features phenomenal fiction, so let’s help them reach their goal!