Eleanor Atwood Arnason (born December 28, 1942) is an American author of science fiction novels and short stories. Arnason's earliest published story, "A Clear Day in the Motor City", appeared in New Worlds in 1973. Her work often depicts cultural change and conflict, usually from the viewpoint of characters who cannot or will not live by their own societies' rules. This anthropological focus has led many to compare her fiction to that of Ursula K. Le Guin. Arnason won the inaugural James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1991 and the 1992 Mythopoeic Award for A Woman of the Iron People and in 2000 won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Fiction for "Dapple" and the HOMer Award for her novelette Stellar Harvest. Stellar Harvest was also nominated for a Hugo Award in 2000. In 2003, she was nominated for two Nebula Awards for her novella Potter of Bones and her short story "Knapsack Poems". In 2004, she was guest of honor at Wiscon. She lives in Minnesota. Background Eleanor Arnason is the daughter of H. Harvard Arnason, a Canadian-born man of Icelandic descent, who worked as an art historian and became the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1951, and Elizabeth Hickcox Yard Arnason, a social worker by profession who spent her childhood in a missionary community in western China. Arnason is the niece of the American feminist Molly Yard and her maternal grandparents were both Methodist missionaries. This Methodist influence would be visible in her works, most notably in Ring of Swords. From 1949 to 1960, Arnason and her parents lived in Walker's "Idea House #2", a futuristic dwelling built next to the Walker Art Center. Arnason has said that her experience growing up around avant-garde artists in a futurist house, in addition to the influence of her feminist, socialist mother contributed to her preoccupation with the future, and consequently science fiction. Prior to 1949, Arnason's family moved frequently: from New York City to Chicago; Washington, D.C.; London; Paris; and St. Paul, Minnesota. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1964, with a B.A. in art history, and continued her education in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, until 1967. She spent the next seven years working as an office clerk in Brooklyn and then Detroit. Her time in these blue-collar, racially diverse areas helped to shape her understanding about class consciousness, conflict, and revolution—notions