Panchali Walford

My great-great grandfather was a writer.  He wrote several volumes on Victorian English families, their homes, the dynamics between these families, and some poetry here and there.  It’s good—the poetry—funnier in parts than I ever could have expected my great-great grandfather to write, considering that Tales of Our Great Families isn’t the kind of title funny people usually give books.

Right now, I’m a double major at University of Colorado at Boulder, studying Creative Writing and Japanese.  I came to writing fantasy by being a person who loved reading fantasy.  Yet, as I grew older, and continued to read works in the genre, and came into my identity as a queer woman, I became exceptionally aware of how little our media and our books reflect what I viewed as an important part of the narrative I experienced.  I wanted fantasy with queer women.  I wanted books with dragons, and witches, and magic, but also with girls that seemed a little more like me, and so I want to help create fiction rich in story and the fantastic while reflecting narratives as diverse as the genre’s readership.

While my writing may be rather different from my great-great grandfather’s, I like to think that we have something in common in wanting people and their experiences to have a lasting reflection in writing. I have a cat and a sister who are always my first readers for anything I write; together we drink a lot of tea and a good amount of hot chocolate—that is, my sister and I do; my cat drinks water.  I work very hard not to kill any of my houseplants; my cat works hard to thwart me.  I love blackberries.