Tochi Onyebuchi

Tochi Onyebuchi (born October 4, 1987) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and former civil rights lawyer.

Early life Onyebuchi was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. His first name means "praise God" in Igbo.

His family lived in New Britain, Connecticut, until 1998, when his father died at the age of 39. Onyebuchi wrote extensively growing up and attempted to sell his first novel in high school. While there, he was a member of the fraternity of St. Anthony Hall. During college, he spent a summer in Morocco learning Arabic.

He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in screenwriting from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He said, "This brought me to the edge of burnout. I wanted to remain involved in those issues, but away from the constant grind. I realized I didn't have the stamina for it." School Library Journal wrote: "Onyebuchi's world-building is strong, and the details leap off the page; readers will witness the poverty, smell the delicious food, and feel the physical pain of being a sin-eater." School Library Journal wrote that War Girls was "A bleak but compulsively readable story with high action and high drama in equal measure". Onyebuchi drew on his experience as a lawyer in setting much of the novel at Rikers Island in New York, where Kev is wrongfully incarcerated. Riot Baby was also a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novella. He started working on this novel before writing Beasts Made of Night. It was selected as The New York Times Editors' Choice Pick and one of "5 Books Not to Miss" by USA Today,

Comics Onyebuchi's first comic was a Domino story for the anthology Marvel's Voices: Legacy.

In 2021, Marvel announced that Onyebuchi would be writing a new comics series titled Black Panther Legends, focused on the origin of the Black Panther, with illustrations by Setor Fiadzigbey. A long-time fan of comics, Onyebuchi said his response to this project was: Is this real? Is this really happening?' ...I still can't totally process that I am writing a Black Panther book for Marvel." It was illustrated by Mattia De Iluis.

Video games In 2021, Onyebuchi was among the writers of Call Of Duty: Vanguard video game developed by Sledgehammer Games and published by Activision.

Awards and honors

+ Awards and honors Year Work Award Category Result 2018 Beasts Made of Night Nommo Award Novel 2020 Riot Baby Nebula Award Novella War Girls Ignyte Award Young Adult Novel Locus Award Young Adult Book Nommo Award Novel 2021 #PublishingPaidMe Ignyte Award Community Award Creative Nonfiction Hugo Award Novella Ignyte Award Novella NAACP Image Award Literature - Fiction Nommo Award Novella World Fantasy Award Novella 2022 Goliath Dragon Awards Science Fiction Novel 2023 Locus Award Science Fiction Novel 2026 Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet Locus Award Non-fiction Harmattan Season Ignyte Award Adult Novel

Personal life

Onyebuchi resides in New Haven, Connecticut. "Samson and the Delilah's", Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (ed. Ibi Zoboi), HarperCollins, 2019. "The Hurt Pattern, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution", Solaris, 2020. "Habibi", A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology. Dhonielle Clayton, editor. Crown Books for Young Readers, 2020. "How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary", Year's Best Science Fiction Volume 2. Jonathan Strahan, editor. Saga Press, 2021. "How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary", The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. Veronica Roth and John Joseph Adams, editors. Mariner Books, 2021.

"Origin Story", Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (ed. Jordan Peele), Random House, 2023.

Short stories in magazines "Dust to Dust", Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing, September 2011 and Lightspeed Magazine, June 2019. "Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown, or Cecile Meets a Boxer: A Love Story", Ideomancer, 2014. "Place of Worship", Asmiov's Science Fiction, September 2014. "Screamers", Omenana, i#8, November 2016. "The Fifth Day", Uncanny Magazine, i#30, September/October 2019. "A Room of One's Own", Us in Flux, Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination, May 2020. "How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary", Slate, August 2020. "Presque Vue", Uncanny Magazine, #41, 2021.

Nonfiction

Essays "From Scalia and a White Supremacist, a Victory for Prisoners' Rights", The Common Law, November 2015. "Where Do Scalia's Come From?", Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, 2016, p. 13–15. "From Harlem to Wakanda: on Luke Cage and Black Panther", Oxford University Press Blog, November 12, 2016. "Homecoming: How Afrofuturism Bridges the Past and the Present", Tor.com, February 27, 2018. "The Art of the Drug Deal: Kanye West, 'Daytona', and the Exploitation of Addiction", RaceBaitr, June 21, 2018. "Homo Duplex", Uncanny Magazine, #24, September/October 2018. "invisible: Not Seeing Myself in Any of my High School Reading Changed Me More than You'd Think", Slate, June 2019. "White Bears in Sugar Land: Juneteenth, Cages, and Afrofuturism", Tor.com, June 19, 2019. "Select Difficulty", Tor.com, August 26, 2019. "My Gift Was Memory: On Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer", Tor.com, October 15, 2019. "30 Minutes Till Madness: Power and Male Derangement in The Wheel of Time", Tor.com, October 21, 2019. "'Where in your affidavit does it say you're Black?': Why Worldbuilding Can't Neglect Race", Tor.com, January 21, 2020. "Why War Stories Could Reinjure Those Affected", Oxford University Press Blog, April 8, 2020. "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The Duty of the Black Writer During Times of American Unrest", Tor.com, June 1, 2020. "Fine Weather, Isn't It?", Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Bulletin #215, December 8, 2020.