Quick message to those dudes–always dudes because of course it fucking is–who rail against “forced” diversity in trying to get beyond just straight white dudes in the Table of Contents:

To be an editor means to seek diversity so that readers can see/experience different angles or perspectives or viewpoints (or whatever in the fuck you want to call it) on a specific theme.  To not seek that diversity is to be lazy, at best, and morally repugnant at worst. 

Doesn’t matter if you’re a little nobody outfit with an editor whose time passed right around the time Bill Clinton was first elected or a New York Times bestselling author and an icon of your genre.  If it’s a pale sausage party in your TOC, you flat-out fucked up and you offer nothing new to the readers.

Oh, totally and completely off-topic, here’s an incomplete list I came up with in roughly five minutes for no particular reason:

Damien Angelica Walters. Kristi DeMeester. Rachel Autumn Deering. Erinn Kemper. Sandra Odell.  Stephanie Wytovich. Lucy Snyder. Cat Valente. Gwendolyn Kiste. Linda Addison. Nnedi Okoafor. Ashlee Scheuerman. Jessica McHugh. Livia Llewellyn. Rena Mason. Lisa Mannetti. Mercedes M. Yardley. Althea Kontis. Sarah Langan. Tonya Liburd. Meghan Accuri-Moran. Kelly Link. Gemma Files. Amber Fallon.

There are over twenty names on that very incomplete list.  They’ve all been recognized for their short fiction.  Again, I offer it for no particular reason at all.