Diana M. Pho is a queer Vietnamese-American independent scholar, playwright, and Hugo Award-winning fiction editor. She has over a decade of experience in traditional, Big Five publishing, including Tor Books, Tor.com Publishing, and the Science Fiction Book Club. Presently, she is now Executive Editor at Erewhon Books, acquiring and editing genre-bending and game-changing fiction.
Additionally, she has a double Bachelor’s degree in English and Russian Literature from Mount Holyoke College and a Master’s in Performance Studies from New York University. Diana’s academic work includes critical analysis of the role of race in fashion, performance, and the media, in addition to pieces focusing on fan studies and fan communities.
Books she has edited have won the Thriller Award (A.J. Hartley’s Steeplejack, for Best Young Adult), the Ditmar Award (Thoraiya Dyer’s Crossroads of Canopy, for Best Novel), the American Library Association’s Alex Award (P. Djeli Clark’s The Black God’s Drums), the Nebula Award (P. Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout), and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year Selection (Marie Miranda Cruz’s Everlasting Nora, for Middle Grade). Several of her books earned Junior Library Guild Selections, multiple starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, School Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, and Kirkus, and are finalists for the Nebula Award, Lambda Literary Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and Andre Norton Award for Young Adult. Diana herself is a two-time finalist for the Ignyte Award, a finalist for the Locus Award, and a Hugo Award recipient for Best Editor, Long-Form, one of the most prestigious honors in the field of speculative fiction.
Podcasts she has produced at Realm Media include Justin C. Key’s Spider King, E. A. Copen’s Black Friday starring Fred Armisen (#1 for Fiction on Apple Podcasts), Joel Dane’s Marigold Breach starring Jameela Jamil and Manny Jacinto (#2 for Fiction on Apple Podcasts), and Sam Boush’s Overleaper starring Thora Birch.
For several years, she has traveled the country as a professional convention speaker about the intersection of social justice and fandom. In the steampunk community, she is best-known for running Beyond Victoriana, an award-winning, US-based blog on multicultural steampunk. She has been interviewed for many media outlets about fandom, including CBS’s Inside Edition, MSN.com, BBC America, the Travel Channel, HGTV, and the Science Channel.
Diana M. Pho 