Growing up, Carolyn Ives Gilman spent her summers on an island in Lake Superior that was once the heart of the Ojibway Nation. Her interest in places where cultures overlap led to a career as a historian of the U.S.-Canada borderland and a writer of fiction about even more exotic borders.
Carolyn Ives Gilman has been publishing fantasy and science fiction for twenty years. Her first novel, Halfway Human (Avon/EOS 1998), was called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF” by Locus magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Bending the Landscape, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others, and she has a collection of short fiction, Aliens of the Heart, from Aqueduct Press. Her work has been translated and reprinted in Russia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, and Germany. She has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award.
In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in 18th- and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her nonfiction book Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, published in 2003 by Smithsonian Books, was featured by the History Book Club and Book of the Month Club. She has been a guest lecturer at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, and Monticello, and has been interviewed on All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, History Detectives, and the History Channel. Her history books have won the Missouri Governor’s Humanities Award, the Missouri Conference on History Best Book Award, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, and the Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award from Choice magazine.
Carolyn Ives Gilman is a native of Minnesota who now lives in St. Louis and works for the Missouri History Museum.