Mari Ness


Mari Ness is an American poet, author, and critic. She has multiple publications in various science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies. Her work has been published in Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and Uncanny. In Locus, Paula Guran said of The Girl and the House that Ness: "subverts and glorifies the clichés and tropes of every gothic novel ever written, in less than 1,800 words"

Career

Ness has been a panelist and guest at a number of science fiction conventions, most notably Worldcon 2019 in Dublin. One reviewer of the Worldcon panel where she participated, "The golden age of animated SF," commented that the members of the panel "meandered and didn’t really answer the question it posed, digressing into questions such as ‘what is genre?’ and ‘what is animation?’ before getting to some light discussion of the eponymous topic in the last 15 minutes." She has also appeared at
OASIS 2019 in Orlando, Florida, and scheduled to appear at CoNZealand 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand.
Ness is also noted for her critical reassessment of classic literary works. Among other analysis, she critiques the presence or lack of an appropriate disability narrative in works where characters have obvious disabilities. Her column on Tor.com, "Disney Read-Watch," which discussed Disney animated films and the classic tales that underlaid them, was a finalist for one of Reddit's 2016 "Stabby" Awards, given by the r/Fantasy subreddit for works related to the genre.
Her work has appeared in several anthologies, some of which have been reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly. Her novelette, “The Ceremony“, published in Fireside Quarterly in 2018, was on Locus’s recommended reading list in 2018. Her fiction that appeared in Lightspeed was noted favorably by Locus in 2017.

Personal life

She lives in central Florida, though she has lived in upstate New York previously. Ness is a wheelchair user due to Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and vertigo. On occasion her experience with these informs her characters and stories and so too does her interests in technology and mythology and how they can resolve or cause issues. She also uses her position to call out events which are insufficiently accessible for people with disabilities.

Works

;Print anthologies:
;Novellas
;Collections
;Short Fiction
;Poetry