Sheila Finch

Sheila Finch was born in London, UK, 29 October 1935. She attended Bishop Otter College (now Chichester University) from 1954-56, then taught for a year (1956-1957) in a primary school in Hackney, London. Following her marriage to Clare Grill Rayner in 1957 (divorced 1980), she emigrated to the US and completed her BA in English Literature at Indiana University in 1959, followed by an MA in linguistics and medieval history in 1962. Her first daughter April Virginia was born 1960 in Indiana. Two more daughters were born when the family relocated to California in 1962, Dawn Helen (1962) and Laurel Elizabeth (1969). From 1963-1967, when the family lived in San Luis Obsipo, she taught part-time at Cuesta College and began publishing poetry. The family moved to Long Beach, California in 1967. Sheila  taught creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College,  from 1970- 2005. The family relocated for two years to Munich, Germany in the 1970s, where Sheila studied German and taught English as a second language.

She is a member of SFWA, serving as Vice-President for two years, then Chair of the Grievance Committee for five years. As Western Regional Director,during the 1980s and 1990s she organized activities for the organization aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor. She is also a charter member of the Asilomar Writers Consortium, founded by Jerry Hannah in Monterrey, 1976.

Besides teaching and publishing, Sheila has been active in the community, serving first as a volunteer for four years in a residential hospice, then for ten years as a volunteer for St Luke’s Episcopal Church’s program for the homes. She also served for eight years on the Mayor’s Advisory Committee for Homelessness.

Sheila Finch currently lives in Long Beach, California.

In her 1986 book Triad, Finch coined the term "xenolinguist" to describe the lingsters who decode alien languages.[2][3] The word has gained widespread acceptance in the science fiction industry and was used to describe the character Uhura in the remake of Star Trek.[4][5]

Finch created a series of tales about communicating with aliens which eventually was consolidated in collection of short stories entitled The Guild of Xenolinguists (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007). The Guild was founded on Earth in the middle of the 22nd century after first contact with a race from somewhere in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. A few early linguists, neurolinguists, ethnographers and computer scientists established the Guild which then took over the responsibility for training xenolinguists to make first contact and to record alien languages in the field. Later, the Guild provided translation services for the expanding commerce and colonization of the following centuries.[6]

• "Reading the Bones" (1998) Nebula novella award winner
• Tiger in the Sky (1999) Winner of the San Diego Book Award for Best Juvenile Fiction
• Infinity's Web (1985) Winner of the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel

• Official website
• The author's blog site
• Sheila Finch at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database