Cecilia Tan is an American writer, editor, sexuality activist, and founder and manager of Circlet Press, which specializes in science fiction erotica, a once uncommon genre; its publications often feature BDSM themes.
Her aspiration was to be a science fiction writer, and she idolized Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ray Bradbury.
The first one was at the July 1991 Gaylaxicon in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, followed soon after by a party at Philcon in November that drew hundreds of participants.
[1] By 1992 she decided to leave her job at Beacon Press to pursue a master's degree in writing at Emerson College.
On her final day of work at Beacon, she returned home to find her first acceptance letter for the publication of a story waiting in her mailbox.
[10] She holds a black belt in tae kwon do, receiving her second degree (dan) in June 2009, and is a certified technician in Okazaki Restorative Massage.
Mate by Lauren P. Burka soon followed, as did a host of small anthologies like SexMagick, TechnoSex, and Worlds of Women.
[6] By June 2009, Circlet Press had published over fifty titles, most of them erotic science fiction with occasional forays into related genres.
A follow-up collection of erotic short stories, White Flames, was published in 2008 by Running Press.
(Weiser killed the imprint after the demise of the Borders bookstore chain and so only two of the four books in the series appeared in Red Silk Editions.)
That same year her online serial, Daron's Guitar Chronicles, won the inaugural Rose and Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction.
In 2004, her research presentation on "The Women's Baseball Marathon" won the USA Today Sports Weekly Award.