Denise Crittendon

Denise Crittendon brings a journalist’s eye to speculative fiction shaped by African history, mythology, music, and futurist imagination. Her journalism career included writing and editing for major newspapers and magazines, and she later brought that observational background to fiction. Where it Rains in Color, published by Angry Robot in 2022, is her debut novel. The science-fiction story is set on Swazembi, a prosperous planet celebrated for its beauty and protected status. Its central figure, Lileala, is the Rare Indigo whose appearance embodies the world’s ideals until an unexplained change in her skin disrupts both her public position and her understanding of home. Crittendon uses that transformation to examine inherited standards of beauty, communal memory, and a society’s confidence in its own exceptionalism. The novel incorporates Afrofuturist worldbuilding and elements associated with Dogon cosmology while keeping its emotional focus on Lileala’s changing identity. Crittendon’s debut joins social observation with an invented planetary culture built around color, ritual, and reputation.