James Patrick Kelly

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Front cover of Burn (2005).

James Patrick Kelly (born 1951 in Mineola, New York) is an American science fiction author who began publishing in the 1970s and remains to this day an important figure in the SF field.

Kelly made his first fiction sale in 1975, and has since been a major force in the science fiction field. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1972, with a B.A. in English Literature. After graduating college, he worked as a full-time proposal writer until 1977. He attended the science fiction workshop, Clarion, twice; once in 1974 and again in 1976. Throughout the 1980s, he and friend John Kessel became involved in the humanist/cyberpunk debate. While Kessel and Kelly were both humanists, Kelly also wrote several cyberpunk-like stories, such as "The Prisoner of Chillon" (1985) and "Rat" (1986). His story "Solstice" (1985) was published in Bruce Sterling's seminal anthology MirrorShades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.

Kelly has been awarded several of science fiction's highest honors. He won the Hugo Award for his novelette "Think Like a Dinosaur" (1995) and again for his novelette "10^16 to 1" (1999). Other stories by him have won the Asimov's Reader's Poll and the SF Chronicle Award. He is frequently on the final ballot for the Nebula Award, the Locus Poll Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He frequently teaches and participates in science fiction workshops, such as Clarion and The Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop. He has served on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts since 1998 and chaired the council in 2004.

He is a frequent contributor to Asimov's Science Fiction, and for the past several years has contributed a non-fiction column to Asimov's, "On the Net." He has had a story in the June issue of Asimov's for the past twenty years.

Most recently, his stand-alone novella, Burn, published by Tachyon Publications, was nominated for a 2006 Hugo Award.

[edit] Works

"Dea Ex Machina" (Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1975)
Planet of Whispers (Bluejay Books, 1984)
Freedom Beach (with John Kessel) (Tor Books, 1985)
"The Prisoner of Chillon" (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1986)
"Rat" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1986)
"Glass Cloud" (Asimov's, June 1987)
Look Into the Sun (Tor Books, 1989)
Heroines (collection) (1990)
"Mr. Boy" (Asimov's, June 1990)
"The Propagation of Light in a Vacuum" (Universe 1, 1990)
"Pogrom" (Asimov's, Jan 1991)
Wildlife (Tor Books, 1994)
"Think Like a Dinosaur" (Asimov's, June 1995) (Hugo Award winner)
Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (collection) (Golden Gryphon Press, 1997)
"10^16 to 1" (Asimov's, June 1999) (Hugo Award winner)
"Ninety Percent of Everything" (with Jonathan Lethem and John Kessel) (F&SF, Sep 1999)
"Undone" (Asimov's, June 2001)
"The Pyramid of Amirah" (F&SF, March 2002)
Strange But Not a Stranger (collection) (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002)
"Bernardo's House" (Asimov's, June 2003)
"Men Are Trouble" (Asimov's, June 2004)
"The Edge of Nowhere" (Asimov's, June 2005)
Burn (Tachyon Publications, 2005) (Hugo Award finalist)
"The Leila Torn Show" (Asimov's, June 2006)
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (coedited with John Kessel) (Tachyon Publications, 2006), featuring stories by Aimee Bender, Michael Chabon, Ted Chiang, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Theodora Goss, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, M. Rickert, Benjamin Rosenbaum, George Saunders, Bruce Sterling, Jeff VanderMeer, and Howard Waldrop