Cecilia Tan is an American writer, editor, sexuality activist, and founder of Circlet Press—the small house that made science-fiction erotica, often thick with BDSM, a real publishing lane instead of a dirty secret. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she has braided leather community work, speculative fiction, erotic romance, and professional baseball writing into one wide career. (She is not the cookbook author of the same name.) For kink readers and smut-loving SF fans, Tan is the person who put safewords, power exchange, and starships in the same sentence and still got literary respect—then built the press, flea markets, and awards trails that kept that work in print.
She wrote professionally as a teenager—monthly columns for Superteen and features for Teen Machine under Sterling’s Magazines—while idolizing Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ray Bradbury and aiming at a science-fiction career. She earned a BA in linguistics and cognitive science from Brown University in 1989, then worked at Beacon Press in Boston. Around the same time she found the leather world through Usenet’s alt.sex.bondage and the SF/fantasy con circuit (Arisia, Gaylaxicon). She was one of five people who started hosting BDSM play parties at science fiction conventions—”asb parties” after the newsgroup. The first landed at Gaylaxicon in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, in July 1991; a Philcon party that November drew hundreds. Other fans later took over hosting while Tan moved deeper into publishing and activism. In 1991–1992 she posted erotic SF regularly on alt.sex.bondage and built an audience before commercial markets caught up.
In 1992 she left Beacon for a master’s in professional writing and publishing at Emerson College. On her last day at Beacon, an acceptance letter arrived for “A True Story” in Susie Bright’s Herotica 4. Off the page she played baseball with the Pawtucket Slaterettes women’s league in Rhode Island (retiring after the 2007 season), holds a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do (June 2009), and is a certified Okazaki Restorative Massage technician. She has described herself as Chinese-Filipino Irish Welsh bisexual and as living a polyamorous lifestyle—identities that also surface in the editorial range of her presses.
Tan joined NLA: New England in 1991, founded the Fetish Fair Fleamarket in 1992, and directed nearly fifty Fetish Fair events across New England (Boston, Providence, and other cities) plus Houston, Atlanta, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Those fairs were practical infrastructure: vendors, education, and social space for leather and fetish communities outside bar-only scenes. She served on the board of the New England Leather Alliance (NELA). National Leather Association International named her Woman of the Year in 2001 and gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004; the Pantheon of Leather added a President’s Award in 2009. With Sarah Desautels she won NLA-I’s 2010 Samois Anthology Award for Like a Thorn. She stepped back from formal BDSM organizational leadership in 2013 for health reasons but continues to teach workshops, speak, and appear at leather and fetish events as a writer-educator.
While still in graduate school she founded Circlet Press, Inc. Its first title was her own chapbook of erotic SF stories, Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords—a title that still signals the house’s mix of speculative premises and explicit consent culture. Lauren P. Burka’s Mate followed, as did small anthologies such as SexMagick, TechnoSex, and Worlds of Women. After her Emerson master’s in 1994 she devoted herself full-time to writing and running Circlet. By June 2009 the press had published more than fifty titles, mostly erotic science fiction. Digital publishing began in 2008; nearly a hundred ebook titles shipped between 2008 and the end of 2013. As editorial director she later created Clasp Editions for SF/F erotic romance and Gressive Press for sexuality outside the big binaries, centering bisexuality, transgender themes, and other hard-to-label identities. In 2014 Circlet co-won Bi Book Publisher of the Year at the Bisexual Book Awards. Circlet’s house style treated kink as narrative engine, not apologetic garnish.
Tan’s fiction has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Nerve.com, and elsewhere. HarperCollins published Black Feathers in 1998; Running Press followed with White Flames in 2008. She moved into erotic romance ebooks in 2009 with Mind Games and The Hot Streak from Ravenous Romance. The Magic University series appeared in ebook from Ravenous and in trade paperback from Red Silk Editions (an imprint of Red Wheel Weiser)—only two of four books made that print run before Borders collapsed—and the series was also published in French. In 2013 her first BDSM romance from a major publisher appeared: Slow Surrender (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing), opening a trilogy in the industry’s newly minted “BDSM billionaire” category after Fifty Shades of Grey. RT Book Reviews nominated the book for erotic Book of the Year and later awarded Tan the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Erotica; Slow Surrender also won an RT Reviewers Choice Award in erotic romance and a Maggie Award for Excellence from Georgia Romance Writers. The Struck by Lightning trilogy saw French publication via Hachette Livre. Another Grand Central trilogy, Secrets of a Rock Star, later appeared in German from Bastei Lübbe. Online serial Daron’s Guitar Chronicles won the inaugural Rose and Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction; The Prince’s Boy earned honorable mentions in the 2010 Rainbow Awards and the NLA: International Writing Awards. By the mid-2010s she had been multiply nominated for the Lambda Literary Award. In 2010 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame for LGBTQ writers at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival.
Parallel to erotica, Tan built a serious baseball byline: The 50 Greatest Yankee Games (Wiley, 2005), The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games with Bill Nowlin (Wiley, 2006), weekly columns for GothamBaseball.com and YankeesXtreme.com, occasional pieces for Yankees Magazine, and the online magazine Why I Like Baseball. At the 2004 national SABR convention she won the USA Today Sports Weekly award for best poster presentation for “The Women’s Baseball Marathon.” She has edited the Maple Street Press Yankees Annual since 2007. In 2011 she became publications director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and co-edited the Baseball Prospectus Annual with King Kaufman during a two-year transition. By 2022 she was SABR’s longest-tenured publications director; that year she co-won the Tweed Webb Lifetime Achievement Award with Sean Forman for editing The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues. The double career applies the same editorial rigor to two American obsessions—sex and baseball.
Tan stands at a rare intersection: leather organizer who built flea markets and won NLA and Pantheon honors; small-press publisher who professionalized SF erotica and bi/trans-inclusive lists; romance novelist who rode the billionaire-BDSM wave without abandoning craft; and sports researcher who steers SABR publications. Dialogues with M. Christian, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and others document her case that sex and speculative fiction belong in the same bookstore aisle. For this site’s readers, Circlet’s safeword-aware speculative smut and the Hachette BDSM romances are the direct pipeline—kink literature as community infrastructure. If you want power exchange that survives plot, worldbuilding, and adult consent culture, Cecilia Tan’s shelf is still one of the best places to start.
