This small publication began after an inspirational haunting in a Portland house that a group of MFA City College alum occupied during a writer’s conference…In the intro to How Long ’til Black Future Month by N.K. Jemisin, the MacArthur fellow writes, “Science fiction ‘claimed’ to be the fiction of the future, but it still mostly celebrated the faces and voices and stories of the past.” Walk into any major writer’s conference if you’re BIPOC and you’ll feel the there is no room for or acceptance of or very little representation of our stories in a millennium that once was foretold in sci-fi and speculative to be in Sun Ra’s words, “another dimension of another kind of living.” This publication aims to hold space for those faces, voices and stories underrepresented in the spec world and beyond. And since we don’t like to lick our wounds, even though #BlackSpecFic Report 2017 indicates only 4.3% of stories published by speculative fiction were written by Black authors, we do want to acknowledge this truth yet tap into our gifts as co-creators to manifest this other kind of living. Join us in riding this rock with us— The Lit Guide to the Galaxy.