1. Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist.
33 Facts About Joanna Russ
1. 2.
Joanna Russ is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny.
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Joanna Russ is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".
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Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Evarett I and Bertha Russ, both teachers.
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Joanna Russ began creating works of fiction at a very early age.
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Joanna Russ graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov, in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960.
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Joanna Russ taught at Queensborough Community College from 1966 to 1967, at Cornell from 1967 to 1972, SUNY Binghamton, from 1972 to 1975, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975 to 1977.
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Joanna Russ became a full professor in 1984 and retired in 1991.
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Joanna Russ came to be noticed in the science fiction world in the late 1960s, in particular for her award-nominated novel Picnic on Paradise.
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Joanna Russ was one of the most outspoken female authors to challenge male dominance of the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers.
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Joanna Russ was one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously.
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Joanna Russ was associated with the American New Wave of science fiction.
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Joanna Russ was a self-described socialist feminist, expressing particular admiration for the work and theories of Clara Fraser and her Freedom Socialist Party.
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Joanna Russ's writing is characterized by anger interspersed with humor and irony.
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Joanna Russ's fiction has been nominated for nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards, and her genre-related scholarly work was recognized with a Pilgrim Award in 1988.
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Joanna Russ believed that anti-pornography activists were not addressing how women experienced pornography created by men, a topic that she addressed in "Being Against Pornography".
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Joanna Russ's work is widely taught in courses on science fiction and feminism throughout the English speaking world.
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Joanna Russ was named to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.
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Gwyneth Jones wrote a 2019 book about Joanna Russ that was part of the University of Illinois Press series called Modern Masters of Science Fiction.
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Joanna Russ's papers are part of the University of Oregon's Special Collections and University Archives.
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Joanna Russ was described as a fearless, incisive, and radical person, whose writing was often characterized as acerbic and angry.
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Joanna Russ was acclaimed as one of science fiction's most revolutionary and accomplished writers.
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Helen Merrick claimed that Joanna Russ is an inescapable figure in science fiction history.
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Joanna Russ felt that science fiction gives something to its readers that cannot be easily acquired anywhere else.
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Joanna Russ maintained that science should be accurate, and seriousness is a virtue.
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Joanna Russ insisted on the unique qualities of her chosen genre, maintaining that science fiction shared certain qualities with art and its flexibility compared to other forms writing.
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Joanna Russ was interested in demonstrating the unique potentials of women science fiction writers.
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Joanna Russ was attacked by readers because of her harsh reviews of Stephen R Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane and Joy Chant's The Grey Mane of Morning.
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Joanna Russ organized attacks into these seven categories, taken directly from the cited article:.
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Around the time of the publication of The Female Man in 1975, Joanna Russ came out as a lesbian.
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However, Joanna Russ remained protective of her personal life, and as late as a December 1981 interview with Charles Platt, she was still evasive on the subject for the first third of the interview.
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Samuel R Delany was quoted as saying that Russ was "slipping away" and had long had a "do not resuscitate" order on file.
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Joanna Russ died early in the morning on April 29,2011.