Several commenters online have called attention to problematic elements in some of our reviews of books by authors of color. We hear you and are taking this seriously. We apologize unreservedly to any authors we harmed and to the SF community as a whole.
We will be putting in place additional editorial procedures for our reviews process to reduce the likelihood of such errors happening again. Our editorial process and review coverage are always evolving, and we will work to improve our coverage of authors from historically marginalized and non-Western worldviews and expand our reviewer roster.
We are listening, and we will do better.
—Locus
AN UPDATE AND A PLAN:
I’d like to thank the online commenters, especially Foz Meadows, who alerted us to an ongoing pattern in our reviews and of problematic language and treatment of books by writers of color and cross-cultural writers. I apologize to the members of the SF community who were hurt by this, and want to let you know we are going to do better. We are seriously stepping up our review game and our editorial oversight around the language, commentary, and interpretation of the books we are reviewing.
Systemically, publishing has suffered from the lack of editors of color in the industry. Our own workflow for editing reviews (we are a very small team) is one reviews editor and a proofreader, both white. To address this, we’re adding a sensitivity reading pass for all reviews, currently by a senior editor who is a queer person of color, to our review editing workflow to flag problematic language, microaggressions, or other interpretation missteps. They’ll also be able request outside sensitivity readers as needed for specific reviews.
We are developing an action plan and considering readings, resources, and feedback systems to educate ourselves and our reviewers. We will work with our reviewing pool to improve sensitivity and to be more knowledgeable about the authors and the cultures behind the books they are reading, and give regular feedback on review language. We will actively educate ourselves here on the editorial end, especially myself, as editor-in-chief, and our reviews editor, about how to better spot language and commentary that is problematic or contains microaggressions. In the past few months we added three reviewers of color and one deafblind reviewer to our reviewer pool, and we will keep working to balance our demographics as we onboard more people.
We will do the work to improve. Thank you all for caring about Locus, and for your patience as we strive to do better.
-Liza Trombi, Editor in Chief
