On June 8th of this year, FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, lost our founder and Editor-in-Chief Dr. Batya Weinbaum.  Dr. Weinbaum founded the journal in 1997 to fill a scholarly niche at the intersections of feminist theory and scholarship and literary scholarship in the realm of speculative fiction.  Since publishing the journal's first issue in 1999, Dr. Weinbaum has served as Editor-in-Chief and as the head of the volunteer collective that manages the journal.  The journal was the fruit of her creative effort, and it is thanks to her vision and leadership that the journal has published academic scholarship and creative writing for over 25 years.

We in the collective will be dedicating the journal's upcoming Issue 26.2 to Dr. Weinbaum in celebration of her leadership and legacy.  We ask that any who knew Batya or whose life has been touched in some way by her remarkable presence to please consider writing a piece in tribute of her.  We will be collecting these tribute pieces and publishing them in Issue 26.2.

If you would like to write a piece in tribute of Dr. Weinbaum, please send via email to our new Editor-in-Chief Dr. Merry Byrd at mbyrd@vsu.edu by August 1st.

Please join together with us in celebrating Dr. Weinbaum's life and legacy and the path that she blazed for speculative feminist scholarship.