We are saddened by the news that author Kit Reed has died.
Over the course of Reed’s long career, she was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best New Author after publishing the story “The Wait” in 1958. She ranged over genres, publishing an early, mainstream novel before her first genre novel Armed Camps, which came out in 1969. She published horror and detective novels under the pseudonyms Shelley Hyde and Kit Craig, respectively. Where was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2016, and she won the Alex Award for Thinner Than Thou in 2005. Her final novel, Mormama, was published last May.
Reed also published ten collections of short fiction including 1967’s Mister Da V and Other Stories, 2013’s The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories in 2013. A story, “Bride of Bigfoot,” and two books, Weird Women, Wired Women, and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, were shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. her “transgenre-ism” is displayed in the variety of her publications, including The Yale Review, Asimov’s SF, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature and The Kenyon Review. She was also a Guggenheim fellow, and the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation.
Reed’s son, Mack Reed, said of his mother:
She loved like a child, worked like a stevedore, cursed like a sailor and traveled and sampled the world with Twainian zest. She was the most two-fisted woman I have ever known, never completely happy unless she was in motion, juggling too many things.
You can read his personal remembrance here. Kit Reed was an incredibly important member of the SFF community, and she will be greatly missed.
