[6] Reviewer Genevieve Williams of speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons summed up about this guidebook: "The practices advocated and concepts presented in Writing the Other may seem PC to some, but following them will help to ensure that an author gives more than lip service to diversity and is thoughtful about the creation and development of societies, cultures, and characters (which we all should be anyway).

"[7] Shawl's first novel, Neo-Victorian, Belgian Congo–set, steampunk story Everfair, was released in September 2016 by Tor Books, with a cover illustration by Hong Kong artist Victo Ngai.

"[8] Their novel imagines that British Fabian Socialists team up with African American Christian missionaries to purchase land in the Congo Basin from Leopold II of Belgium, thus creating a speculative new nation in their version of history, where citizens could experiment with the freedoms they had lacked in their original homelands, as well as benefit from a key technology of the industrial revolution, namely steam engines.

[10] In 2015, recognized as one of the "go to" teachers and mentors within the speculative fiction community on pedagogical issues of diversity, they served as guest speaker both in the "Black to the Future: An Imagination Incubator" ("Ferguson is the Future") symposium of multicultural speculative fiction artists, academics, and creative writers, at Princeton University (held on September 14, 2015)[11] and in the "Creating Futures Rooted in Wonder" symposium of fairy tale, science fiction, and indigenous storytellers and scholars, at the University of Hawai'i (held from September 16–19, 2015), where they performed in author readings with Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and other indigenous writers, as well as led creative writing workshops.

[12] Shawl's novel Everfair joins with the growing movement of international speculative fiction by writers of color, including editorial efforts by Jaymee Goh of Malaysia and Joyce Chng of Singapore (author-anthologists behind the 2015 collection of Southeast Asian steampunk published in English, The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia[13]), to repurpose the science fiction trope of alternate history in critical ways that foreground issues of colonialism, globalization, and culture.

[15] Shawl's anthology work has been part of their longtime participation within both the feminist and the African American science fiction writing communities, evidenced in their editing of WisCon Chronicles Vol.

[22] Among those who have influenced their work, they have named writers Colette, Monique Wittig, and Raymond Chandler; as well as speculative fiction authors Gwyneth Jones, Suzy McKee Charnas, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Howard Waldrop, and Eileen Gunn.