Jada Koren Pinkett Smith is an American actress, singer and talk show host. She is co-host of the Facebook Watch talk show Red Table Talk, for which she has won a Daytime Emmy Award. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Artemis Fowl is a young adult fantasy novel written by Irish author Eoin Colfer. It is the first book in the Artemis Fowl series, followed by Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident. Pitched by its author as "Die Hard with fairies", the novel follows fairy LEP reconnaissance officer Holly Short after she is kidnapped by twelve-year-old criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl II for a large ransom of gold.
A shield-maiden was a female warrior from Scandinavian folklore and mythology.
Willow Smith, also known mononymously as Willow, is an American singer. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, she has received various accolades, including a Young Artist Award, an NAACP Image Award, a BET Award, and nominations for two Daytime Emmy Awards and a MTV Video Music Award.
Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
Kelly Link is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Holly Black is an American writer and editor best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Her most recent work is the New York Times bestselling young adult Folk of the Air series. She is also well known for The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children's fantasy books she created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and her debut trilogy of young adult novels officially called the Modern Faerie Tales. Black has won a Lodestar Award, a Nebula Award, and a Newbery Honor.
Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.
The Black Company is a series of dark fantasy books written by American author Glen Cook. The series combines elements of epic fantasy as it follows an elite mercenary unit, the Black Company, through roughly forty years of its approximately four-hundred-year history.
Naomi Novik is an American author of speculative fiction. She is known for the Temeraire series (2006–2016), an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars involving dragons, and her Scholomance fantasy series (2020–2022). Her standalone fantasy novels Uprooted (2015) and Spinning Silver (2018) were inspired by Polish folklore and the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale respectively. Novik has won many awards for her work, including the Alex, Audie, British Fantasy, Locus, Mythopoeic and Nebula Awards.
In Slavic folklore, the rusalka is a female entity, often malicious toward mankind and frequently associated with water, it has counterparts in other parts of Europe, such as the French Melusine and the Germanic Nixie. Folklorists have proposed a variety of origins for the entity, including that they may originally stem from Slavic paganism, where they may have been seen as benevolent spirits. Rusalki appear in a variety of media in modern popular culture, particularly in Slavic language-speaking countries, where they frequently resemble the concept of the mermaid.
Disney Fairies is a Disney franchise created in 2005. The franchise is built around the character of Tinker Bell from Disney's 1953 animated film Peter Pan, subsequently adopted as a mascot for the company. In addition to the fictional fairy character created by J. M. Barrie, the franchise introduces many new characters and expands substantially upon the limited information the author gave about the fairies and their home of Never Land. The characters are referred to within stories as "Never Land fairies." The franchise includes children's books and other merchandise, a website and the animated Tinker Bell film series, featuring the character and several of the Disney fairies as supporting and recurring characters.
BET's Top 25 is a countdown show that features top 25 favorites such as top 25 men/women, dances, actors, rappers, etc., with commentary from industry insiders.
Black science fiction or black speculative fiction is an umbrella term that covers a variety of activities within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres where people of the African diaspora take part or are depicted. Some of its defining characteristics include a critique of the social structures leading to black oppression paired with an investment in social change. Black science fiction is "fed by technology but not led by it." This means that black science fiction often explores with human engagement with technology instead of technology as an innate good.
"Whip My Hair" is the debut single by American singer-songwriter Willow Smith, released in 2010 under the name Willow. The song was written by Ronald "Jukebox" Jackson and Janae Liann Ratliff, and produced by Ronald Jackson. "Whip My Hair" peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Outside of the United States, "Whip My Hair" peaked within the top ten of the charts in Belgium (Wallonia), Denmark, and the United Kingdom, and peaked within the top 20 of the charts in Australia, Canada, and Ireland.
Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash is a Japanese light novel series written by Ao Jūmonji and illustrated by Eiri Shirai. The story follows a group of people who suddenly find themselves in a fantasy world with no memories from before their arrival, and chronicles their struggles to survive and make a life for themselves as volunteer soldiers.
Red Table Talk is an American talk show starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith, and Jada's mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. The series premiered on May 7, 2018 on Facebook Watch, and would run for 5 seasons and 129 episodes on the streaming service. The series also spawned a spinoff, Red Table Talk: The Estefans, led by Gloria Estefan, Emily Estefan and Lili Estefan. Facebook Watch ended the series run in April 2023 as part of the cancellation of all TV shows of original programming on Facebook Watch, although Red Table Talk producers, Westbrook Studios, will continue the project and are reportedly seeking a new home for the series, which is slated to return in 2024.
Demon Lord, Retry! is a Japanese fantasy light novel series written by Kurone Kanzaki and illustrated by Kōji Ogata and Amaru Minotake. It began serialization online in 2016 on the user-generated novel publishing website Shōsetsuka ni Narō, as well as the website Hameln. It was later acquired by Futabasha, which has published the series since June 2017 under its Monster Bunko imprint. A manga adaptation with art by Amaru Minotake has been serialized via Futabasha's digital publication Web Comic Action since October 2017. J-Novel Club has licensed the light novel and manga series for English releases in July 2019, with the first English-translated volume being published in November 2019.
Tracy Deonn is an American author. Her debut novel Legendborn (2020) was a New York Times bestseller and received a Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent and the 2021 Ignyte Award for Best Young Adult Novel. The sequel novel Bloodmarked was published in 2022 and also became a #1 New York Times bestseller.
