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News
More of a request, really. The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones is eligible for the Nebula and Hugo Awards in the Novella category, so if you’re a SFWA or Worldcon voting member, please consider nominating it. It’s a terrific retelling/reinterpretation of Beauty and the Beast and we’d love to see it get more buzz!

Coming up in December:

1. Word Salad: Winter – December 3rd, 3 -4:30PM, Eat My Words Bookstore, Minneapolis. Join Michael Merriam and other storytellers for a tribute to our local climate.
2. Write On! Radio KFAI FM – December 6th, 7-8 PM. Michael Merriam will be interivewed about Last Car to Annwn Station (you can listen online and there ill be an archived version available, too).
3. Minnesota Women’s Art Festival – December 10th, 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM. St. Mary’s University, Minneapolis. We’ll have a booth with Catherine’s books, our tea and artwork by artist Jana Pullman.
4. 4th AZ Gallery Pop-Up Bookstore – December 10th, 2-6 PM.  AZ Gallery, St. Paul, MN. Michael Merriam will have a table at where he’ll be selling some of his Weird West tales, Last Car and some of our other titles.
5. Smashwords End of Year Sale – 12/15/22-1/1/23! Get some great deals on our titles to wrap up 2022!
6. End of Year IHeartSapphFic Sale – and look for Emily L. Byrne’s book on sale at Amazon for the last sale of the year 12/26-12/30!

I just realized that I forgot to post August’s – there was a lot! See our Event’s page for info on that.

Meanwhile, here’s this month’s adventures!

September:

• Chicon 8/Worldcon – September 1-5th. Catherine Lundoff , Alex Acks, Heather Rose Jones and Jennie Goloboy will be on programming.
• Pagan Pride Fall Festival – September 10th. Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis. Look for our book table in the park.
• Queer Neurodiverse Found Families in Speculative Fiction – Thursday, September 15th, 7-9PM. Virtual panel at the Argo Bookshop, Montreal, Quebec featuring Rem Wigmore, Andi C. Buchanan, R.B. Lemberg and more.
• St. Cloud Pride in the Park – Saturday, September 17th, 11-3PM. St. Cloud, MN. Queen of Swords Press will be back!
• Crypticon on September 16th- 18th in Plymouth, MN. Look for Michael Merriam in the Dealer’s Room with copies of Last Car.
• Sunday Market at Dancing Bear Chocolate – September 25th, 9-2PM. Minneapolis. Catherine Lundoff will be there with our books and lovely handmade journals and boxes made by book artist Jana Pullman.

All the news for this month!

• Preorders for Last Car to Annwn Station by Michael Merriam are available direct from us, on Kobo and Amazon and Bookshop.org, B&N and beyond! Release date 7/7! 
• BayCon 2022 – July 1st-4th. San Francisco. Look for Heather Rose Jones on programming and selling The Language of Roses at the Liminal Fiction Authors table. She’ll also have the tie-in coloring book featuring her art and some of our other books.
• West St. Paul Pride – 11-4PM, July 9th. Queen of Swords Press will have a booth, books and deal!
• r/Fantasy Small Press AMA – July 15th. Queen of Swords Press will once again have a Small Press AMA on Reddit Fantasy. All our authors will be there!
• Book Release/Birthday Party at DreamHaven Books! July 21st 6:30-8:00PM. Queen of Swords Press is doing a re-release/first time in print edition of Michael Merriam’s homage to 2000s Minneapolis with a queer romance and the ghosts of the old streetcar line, Last Car to Annwn Station, and Jennie Goloboy and Catherine Lundoff never got in person releases for their books last year so we’re going to make up for lost time!
• Sunday Market at Dancing Bear Chocolate – July 24th, 9-2PM. Minneapolis. Publisher Catherine Lundoff will be there with our books and lovely handmade journals and boxes made by her wife, Jana.
• Book sales for July! Most of our titles will be on sale at Smashwords from July 1st-July31st and Catherine Lundoff’s Silver Moon and Blood Moon and Emily L. Byrne’s Medusa’s Touch will be on sale on Amazon 7/22-7/26 for I Heart SapphFic’s Christmas in July sale.

Hope to see you at one of our online or in person events!

We’ll be releasing a new edition of Minnesota author Michael Merriam’s terrific f/f urban fantasy set in Minneapolis, Last Car to Annwn Station,on 7/7/22! And we love Nathalie Gray of Kanaxa’s design for the cover! Preorders will be up very soon.

1. Pride Month StoryBundle – June 1st-July 1st. Our annual event, this year featuring books by Melissa Scott, Heather Rose Jones, Rem Wigmore, Andi C. Buchanan, Jerry Wheeler, C.L. Clark and more! It will once again benefit Rainbow Railroad, an international nonprofit working with LGBTQ+ refugees and others fleeing persecution. 
2. Finding Your Path: An Agent and a Publisher Spill the Tea on Agenting and Small Press Publishing – Clarion West Writers Workshop – June 5th, 11AM-12PM PST. Online. Jennie Goloboy and Catherine Lundoff will be teaching this workshop where you can get a lot of your questions answered about agents and publishers and what we do. And it’s free!
3. Library of Congress on 6/21! Pretty excited about this! Catherine Lundoff will be on “Queering Small Publishing,” a lunch and learn panel for LoC staff, including  publishers from Neon Hemlock, Stelliform Press and Black Lesbian Feminist Press.
4. Catherine was on the If This Goes On Podcast on 4/30 – https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/if-this-goes-on-dont-panic-alan-bailey-Qx_fTWkwl2d/
5.  “Creating New Worlds” – Geek Girl Con Twitch, June 14th, 7PM PST. Catherine will be on a panel about world building in science fiction and fantasy.
6. 4th Street Fantasy – June 17-19th, Minneapolis. Catherine Lundoff, Jenny Goloboy and Michael Merriam will all be in attendance and around.
7. Alex Acks has a new story out in StarcraftWar Chest (Blizzard Entertainment, 2022).
8. The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones continues to get terrific reviews, including these two: Out in Print and The Lesbian Review. Heather just created a free tie-in coloring book, which you can get when you buy a copy of the book from her or us, while supplies last!
9. We’ve added a TikTok! Check out short videos and watch Catherine figure out how it works!

We’ve got all sorts of things coming up!

Currently, that includes the SFWA Auction. Bid on signed copies of Blood Moon by Catherine Lundoff, Obviously, Aliens by Jennie Goloboy and Wireless by Alex Acks and help support SFWA scholarships and programming!

Other fun things coming up:

1. Foxhunt by Rem Wigmore is a Sir Julius Vogel Award finalist for Best Novel! And Laya Rose is nominated for her cover art for it too! Congratulations to both of them and to our webmaster, Andi, who’s a finalist in another category!
2. The Language of Roses is getting some great reviews, like this one from the Runalong the Shelves Book Blog and this one from James Nicoll Reviews.
3. Heather Rose Jones was a guest reader at FOGCon on 4/30 and will be reading at the fab online reading series, Strong Women, Strange Worlds, on 5/19.
4. Catherine Lundoff was on the If This Goes On Podcast on 4/30, along with author Matthew Kressel, talking about hopepunk, climate fiction, running a green business, and more.
5. Rochester Pride – May 21st, 12-5pm. Rochester, MN. We’ll have a booth at this new-to-us event.
6. WisCon – May 27th-30th. Madison, WI. We’ll have a table in the Dealer’s Room and Heather Rose Jones and Catherine will both be on programming.

Things coming up in June

1. Pride Month StoryBundle – June 1st – July 1st. Our annual event, this year featuring books by Melissa Scott, Heather Rose Jones, Rem Wigmore, and others to be announced. It will once again benefit Rainbow Railroad, an international nonprofit working with LGBTQ refugees!
2. Finding Your Path: An Agent and a Publisher Spill the Tea on Agenting and Small Press Publishing – Clarion West Writers Workshop – June 5th, 11AM-12:30PM PST. Online and free. Jennie Goloboy and Catherine will be teaching this workshop where you can get your questions answered and learn cool and nifty things about what agents do, what publishers do and what to consider doing with your books.
3. Queering Small Press Publishing – June 21, 12-1PM. Library of Congress. Catherine Lundoff will be on a panel for Library of Congress staff with publishers from Neon Hemlock, Stelliform Press and BLF Press. Not open to the public, alas, but very cool anyway.

More coming soon!

We’ve been wildly busy!

Here’s some of the things you can watch, listen to or join in on, depending on what’s going on:

Check out StabbyCon on r/fantasy forum on Reddit to see Catherine Lundoff on the Gothic Fantasy panel and Rem Wigmore is on the roundtable on writing gender in speculative fiction.

Write on! Radio KFAI – March 15th, 7-8PM CST. Streaming or on your radio dial.  Jennie Goloboy, Michael Merriam and Catherine Lundoff were on this long running local radio show to talk about Queen of Swords Press !

Rem Wigmore was on the Queer Words Podcast on 3/1 and on Hannah’s Bookshelf on 1066 North Manchester FM in the U.K. on 2/22!

Flights of Foundry – April 9th-10th. Online. Queen of Swords Press will have a virtual booth and Rem, A.J. and Catherine will be on programming.

The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones will be out on 4/14! You can preorder from us or everywhere else AND it is available on the SFWA NetGalley if you’re a reviewer who uses NG (and if you don’t, feel free to contact us directly).

More coming soon!

Welcome to 2022! We turn 5 years old this very month and we are so very excited to share that with you! If you’ve bought and/or reviewed out books, supported our Patreon, hosted us and helped us spread the word about our books and the Press, you’ve helped us get here, so thank you very much! And if you’re new here, welcome! We hope you like it.

Now on to the birthday month shenanigans. We had originally hoped to have an in person birthday party at DreamHaven Books, but given where things are at pandemic-wise, decided to postpone a few months. Here’s what we’re doing instead:

• Follow us on Twitter for fun facts about the Press, our authors, our cover artists and what we’ve been up to.
• Jennie Goloboy has a terrific new interview and reading from Obviously, Aliens up at the Tales from the Trunk Podcast.
• The North Country Gaylaxians Book Club hosted a good discussion about The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. Fitzwater on 1/11 at 7PM CST.
• Drawings and readings and other fun stuff! We’ll be doing some prize drawings for newsletter subscribers as well as our Twitter and FB followers, posting some new reading videos and more! Prizes include some of our books, our new tea blend from Bingley’s Teas, a couple of pairs of Elise Matthesen’s book-themed earrings and more! The fun will kick off on 1/15 so please stay tuned.
• BOOK SALE! Our 5 Day/5th Birthday Book Sales kicks off on 1/27 and runs through 1/31 right here on our website! Buy direct from us for some great deals!
• Plus, there’ll be a lot of great stuff coming in the rest of 2022! Thanks for joining us!

This one will be really straightforward:

Foxhunt by Rem Wigmore, Obviously, Aliens by Jennie Goloboy and Blood Moon by Catherine Lundoff were all published by us in 2021 and are eligible for awards for novel-length work (over 80k words, in this case). All 3 are currently nominated for awards ranging from the Lambda Literary Awards to the Minnesota Book Awards. Foxhunt and Aliens are both science fiction, Blood Moon is fantasy/dark fantasy. Rem, Jennie and A.J. also have short fiction that is award-eligible for the Hugo’s, Nebulas, etc. and Alex is up for their podcast work on the Skiffy and Fanty Show. Catherine could be nominated for best long form editor or related but thinks that’s a bit of a stretch. Thanks for considering!