Erin Swan was born in Manhattan and lived there for ten years until her family moved upstate, where she started writing stories and poems. She used her early adulthood to travel,
write children’s books, and work for a literary agency before going to teach English in India and Thailand. Swan earned her MA from Teacher’s College at Columbia University and began teaching in New York’s public school system in 2008.
[
Q&A with Erin Swan;
The Page 69 Test: Walk the Vanished Earth]
While teaching full-time, Swan attended the MFA program at the New School and graduated with a degree in fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including
Portland Review,
Atticus Review,
The South Carolina Review, and
Inkwell Journal, and her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Walk the Vanished Earth is Swan's first novel.
At Tor.com she tagged "five books that feature fragile worlds. Though they come from different genres, each one explores this tension between apparent weakness and actual strength, between our known world and others that may exist, if only we can discover how to part the curtain between them." One title on the list:
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
The world in this debut novel is not fragile at all. It is solid, substantial, grindingly and exhaustingly real, cluttered with playgrounds and plastic toys, library reading circles and perfectly groomed moms with perfectly groomed kids. It is the protagonist’s grasp of this world that is tenuous. To her, reality seems a 
mirage, set in place to distract her from her true self, a formerly autonomous woman now swamped by motherhood and its demands. Initially called only “the mother,” the main character is an artist who has paused her career to care for her son while her husband travels for work. She knows she should value this privilege – it’s a dream life, is it not? – but she is worn out, physically, emotionally, and spiritually depleted. Then, one day, while listening to her son cry, she discovers something new: rage. As Yoder tells us, “That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself – that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do.” Soon she discovers other things: an odd patch of hair at her neck’s nape, sharper canines, a ravenous appetite for raw steak. A delightfully feral look at what it means to be a mother, a wife, and a woman in contemporary American society, Nightbitch gives us a character unafraid to crawl into the night on all fours, ready to snap the thin line between one world and the next with her teeth. I would love to see Nightbitch and Karen Reyes from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters meet. I imagine they would have a great deal to say, or perhaps howl, to each other.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
write children’s books, and work for a literary agency before going to teach English in India and Thailand. Swan earned her MA from Teacher’s College at Columbia University and began teaching in New York’s public school system in 2008.
