Genre Grapevine: I’m No Longer Staying Silent about Emily Bell’s Harassment

Yesterday I wrote a happy post about my life, focusing on the pending re-release of Plague Birds and being a finalist for both the Hugo and Ignyte Awards. Unfortunately, I now need to discuss the bad stuff that has been going on recently: For the last year and a half, I have been harassed by Emily Bell, also known as E.D.E. Bell, of Atthis Arts.

This harassment started after I wrote the following one-paragraph item in my Genre Grapevine back in January 2025 (the item is towards the bottom of the column):

The Gen Con Writers Symposium announced that Maurice Broaddus will lead the 2025 symposium. Broaddus has served on the board of the Writers Symposium for the last three years and was heavily involved in bringing in a number of high profile guests such as Mikki Kendall, John Jennings, and Sheree Renée Thomas. The contract of the previous leader of the Writers Symposium, E.D.E. Bell, was not renewed by Gen Con in September. Bell attributed this decision to trying to make the symposium more inclusive and inviting guests of honor such as Linda D. Addison and Mikki Kendall. However, Erik Scott de Bie disputed Bell’s account, instead saying that Bell was not retained due to “poor communication, acting unilaterally, and not consulting” Gen Con on decisions.

As you can see, I shared Emily Bell’s view of what happened at the Writers Symposium along with an opposing viewpoint.

To say Emily did not like my short report is an understatement. First off, she objected to me sharing Erik Scott de Bie’s account. Emily has accused Erik of being friends with an abuser at Gen Con, adding that he is “proudly friends with the person who got me banned for whistleblowing” and “has been involved in a chain of sowing distrust against our work and our press.”

However, I haven’t seen any evidence that those accusations are true. Instead, if you read Erik’s account, it is very even-handed. He digs into the background of everything that went on with the Writers Symposium and criticizes both Gen Con and the Bells. I felt that sharing Erik’s account – again, alongside Emily’s own account of what happened – presented the best possible way for people to get at the truth of the matter.

The other reason Emily was outraged at my short report is she claimed she wasn’t in charge of the Gen Con Writers Symposium, such as in this thread where she said “There was a reason that this genre journalist printed that I was in charge of the event I got banned from. He was told it was false and refused to correct it. Read that a few times, then look at his thousands of likes and cheers.”

In that thread, Emily added that “This is misogyny. A man was in charge.” This was an allusion to her husband, Chris Bell, who was also involved and evidently the de facto chair of the committee that ran the symposium.

However, I based my reporting on Emily being in charge around several facts. First, Emily ran all the panel assignments and was also the main contact for that, which I know because I was a panelist that year. I also spoke to other sources who confirmed that Emily essentially ran the Writers Symposium.

Finally, Emily even admitted running the symposium programming in a post on Bluesky prior to the convention, saying “So I lead Gen Con Writers’ Symposium programming and I can tell you that I do not base Speaker decisions on fame. I base it on how much value they’ll offer our attendees, including how welcoming the environment will be. Got removed from Origins for this, to no one’s protest or even reporting.”

I’ve long admired the work of Emily and Chris Bell, along with the books published by Atthis Arts. Emily even published and edited a couple of my stories in different anthologies. I happened to be at the ConFusion Convention in Detroit a few weeks after my column came out, and Emily and Chris were also there. So I decided to speak to them about all this and smooth the waters.

I walked up to the Bells while they sat at a table in the bar area next to where a group of my friends were sitting. My friends watched the interaction, which is important because Emily would later accuse me of doing things to her I didn’t do, which if it had happened people watching us would have seen.

In my discussion with the Bells, I said that I had sources and information to back up what I wrote, but that didn’t mean I didn’t respect the work they and their press did. Chris seemed receptive and open during our discussion, but Emily was not. She kept saying that what I wrote was wrong, and that if I didn’t agree with her point of view I was as bad as those who were supposedly attacking her and their press.

Shortly after we talked, Emily posted a thread on Bluesky detailing her view of our discussion. I disagree with her take on the discussion, except she is correct that at some point I realized the conversation wasn’t going anywhere and said “I’m done” and returned to sit with my friends.

One interesting aspect of that thread is that Chris responded to Emily, and said “I appreciate that Jason took the effort to come talk to us and am sad at the direction it went.” And when Emily responded to him that she “would have appreciated (Jason) talking to us, but he was only talking at us,” Chris publicly disagreed with her assessment of how the conversation unfolded.

About thirty minutes later, Chris came up to me and said Emily was in a bad place right now but that he appreciated what I tried to do. I told him I understood, we hugged, and then he returned to sit with Emily. A writer I know was sitting next to me when this happened and both witnessed and heard everything between me and Chris. This writer recently confirmed with me that everything happened just as I’m relating.

I thought things would calm down after that. Obviously, Emily and I disagreed on what I reported. However, the report was only a small bit of news and everything would soon settle down.

I was wrong. Things did not settle down.

Over the following year, Emily appeared to have a personal vendetta against me. On social media, she continually blamed me for the troubles she and her press were having.

Sometimes Emily named me, such as here, here, and here, where she said I publish “unqualified disinformation and lies.”

Sometimes she called me the “oft-praised genre reporter.”

Other times I was merely referred to by my initials, as in this thread where Bell says people unfollowed her on social media because she said my name. Toward the end of the thread, she says, “I’m sorry about JS and I don’t want him to feel bad either. But look around. Things are very very serious, and a white guy getting praised for taking on the patriarchy while exhibiting its very deepest traits is not the way. Help him learn?”

And those are only a few of the times Emily wrote about me. There are many more, which I saved as screenshots.

I did not respond to any of Emily’s social media posts during 2025. I also avoided interacting in any way with Emily. I did this because I remembered what Chris told me, that Emily had been in a bad place. I also knew that she was neurodiverse, like myself. While we’d had one or two disagreements prior to January 2025, I didn’t consider those disagreements that big a deal. And I both liked her work and admired the books her press published.

But as the year went on, the continual attacks wore me down. And then I learned that Emily was not only posting about me on social media, she was reaching out behind the scenes to disparage and slander me to various people in the genre, including editors, fans, podcasters, and so on. For example, I was forwarded emails Emily sent to a listserve used by numerous editors across the genre. In these messages I was referred to as “the genre reporter” with enough additional info provided that everyone would know exactly who she was describing. In other messages, she explicitly named me as she repeated lies about what I’d supposedly done.

But I still kept silent, naively thinking the harassment would still blow over. It did not.

Several things finally pushed me to go public with Emily’s harassment. First, I saw Emily doing to other people what she had done to me, as Brandon Crilly, Avi Silver, and Brian Keene describe in these respective threads.

Second, I was again namedropped by Emily when the table of contents to the Gen Con Writers Symposium anthology was announced. As a participating author at the convention, I’d agreed to let the editors reprint one of my stories. But when the ToC was announced – prior to the signing of any contracts, I should note – myself and many others were shocked to discover that all of the included authors were white. This happened despite the symposium’s special and featured guests being Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Justina Ireland, and Kwame Mbalia.

I was horrified when I learned this and immediately contacted Maurice Broaddus, who runs the symposium. Like me, he was beyond pissed at the anthology only including white authors and had already told the editors the book couldn’t be published. I thought Maurice and the Writers Symposium handled the problem very well, responding immediately and decisively when the problem was uncovered. But Emily Bell repeatedly used the issue to attack the Writers Symposium and, by extension, Broaddus, despite him creating the most diverse Writers Symposium ever.

Finally, there was the recent Nebula Awards ceremony.

I hadn’t been able to attend a Nebula Awards ceremony in several years and was particularly excited to support my friend Jordan Kurella, who was a finalist for his amazing novella Death of Mountains. I was also eager to hear what one of my favorite authors, N. K. Jemisin, would say when she received the SFWA Grand Master Award.

Jordan and I sat down at a table with other of our friends. At some point after we sat down, I discovered that Emily subsequently was seated at the table next to us, meaning she was sitting directly behind me during the ceremony. I didn’t know if this was coincidence or deliberate and decided to simply ignore her.

Jemisin’s speech was one for the ages, as I reported here. In particular, Jemisin’s words about “There is value in tradition until it becomes a chain wrapped around a child” resonated deeply with me, so I posted that quote on Bluesky during the ceremony (note I later deleted that Bluesky post because there was a mistake in it).

I noticed Emily glaring at me as I cheered Jemisin’s speech. So I wasn’t overly surprised when, the next day, several friends showed me her latest social media post:

“If you quote N.K. Jemisin about children but make absolutely no effort to obstruct racists and transphobes from influencing our children you are also a danger to our youth. I’m banned for saying it, and they’re rewarded for being so nice and doing good work.”

Yeah, I’m done being silent.

It appears Emily blames me for many issues in her life, as she posted last year on Bluesky:

“How would things be different right now if his genre blog had told people the truth that I was being attacked by racist abusers and to please support and protect me and my press?”

Bell then accuses me of costing her “the life-saving comfort” of community. And adds, “Would our press have lost thousands of dollars? Would I have been attacked for my distress about that? Would the racists still be on panels and me not? Would I be waking up screaming every night? Would our Kickstarter have funded?”

Despite what Emily has said, I never tried to deplatform her, Chris Bell, or Atthis Arts. I never told people to unfollow her or to not support her fundraisers or books. What I did was distance myself from her. I refused to take part in anything she was doing and I simply didn’t respond to her attacks on me.

I take no joy in writing these words. I’d hoped the harassment would stop, but it never did.

Earlier this year, Keffy R.M. Kehrli wrote a Bluesky thread detailing what myself and others have been through, which I really appreciate. If you want more details on all this, please read Keffy’s January 2026 thread along with his new thread from this month. In addition, Krista D. Ball also published an excellent thread on all this at the start of this year, and has continued to cover these issues.

Keffy wrote something that really resonated with me. As he said to Emily,

“You want constant and unrelenting grace for your behavior. If YOU misspeak, it’s because of your disabilities and/or trauma. If any single person says word one that you don’t like, they are afforded no grace. No grace. No care. No gosh maybe they had a bad day. No, we are all cis het white men ‘punching down.’ Never mind that most of us are not all of those things and some of the people you’ve been claiming are sad puppies/charlie kirk supporters/fascists/etc are none of them. … I’m not angry or even really upset right now. Nor did I have time for this. But it just KEEPS COMING UP and it keeps being annoying to watch someone who CLAIMS to give a shit about social justice attack and lie about and insinuate that large numbers of people who have been doing the work for decades are all, actually, secret fascists. Every single one of them.

“You get pushback because you apparently believe that you are the only righteous person who can only ever ‘punch up’, and everyone else is a fascist bootlicker who ‘punches down’ regardless of who they are or what they do. Stop it.”

Yes, Emily, stop it. You have done so much good in the world. You can still do so much good with the books you publish. But attacking everyone who disagrees with you – no matter how minor the disagreement – does not make the world a better place.

I will no longer stay silent.