Naomi Kritzer ’95 knew she would be sure to find her place at Carleton when she was introduced to “The Antichrist.” She grew up as a “socially awkward” child who read “piles and piles of books.” In high school, she visited Carleton for the first time and stayed overnight on 4th Myers, but was unsure if it would be the right fit.
“I was chatting with the young women who were hosting me, and I was like, ‘everyone’s so nice, but no one seems to be weird. Does Carleton have any weirdos?’ [My host] was like, ‘yes, they all live in Goodhue! I’ll take you to Goodhue and introduce you to the Antichrist,’” said Kritzer.
“The Antichrist” turned out to be a student who earned the moniker because of his “giant movie poster for ‘Clockwork Orange,’” continued Kritzer. “I did meet some more nerdy people, and I was like, ‘okay, I will be able to find nerdy people here.’”
Today, Kritzer is a highly acclaimed, Hugo-Award winning science fiction and fantasy writer. Her latest book, OBSTETRIX, is coming out in June 2026. But her roots as a writer trace back to the young bookworm growing up in Madison, WI.
“Star Wars was my very first fandom,” she recalled. “I saw the very first Star Wars movie when I was four years old, when it was new. I loved it. It blew my mind. I loved it so much. When I discovered there were books that had spaceships and robots and stuff in them, I was really thrilled.”
Soon, Kritzer discovered the excitement of making her own stories.
“As a little kid, I really liked playing games of ‘Let’s Pretend’ with my friends. I started writing in middle school because I kind of ran out of people to play ‘Let’s Pretend with.’ So I was making up stories, but I started writing them down,” said Kritzer.
She continued to write stories throughout middle and high school. When she arrived at Carleton, she was delighted to find like-minded people.
“One of my earliest Carleton memories [was when] I went on the pre-freshman week trip to the Boundary Waters. As we sat around the campfire one night, we started talking about our favorite books. It was one of the first times I had ever been in a conversation with so many people who had read the same books I had. We’d all read The Westing Game, and we’d all read Wrinkle in Time, and we’d all read A Little Princess,” said Kritzer.
At Carleton, Kritzer was a religion major and worked in the computer center. In her senior year, she lived in Sci-Fi House. She fondly remembers late Saturday nights watching “Babylon 5,” “Deep Space Nine” and the “X-Files.”
She also took Professor Emeritus Gregory Blake-Smith’s short story workshop. “The most useful thing from that entire class was the very last day, when one of my classmates asked the professor, ‘do you think any of us in this class have what it takes to be professional writers? [Blake-Smith] kind of sighed and said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any way to know, because what it actually takes is sticking with it… I have no way of knowing right now which of you will stick with it, but that’s what it takes,’” said Kritzer. “I was like, ‘oh, okay, I could do that.’ What I needed to do if I wanted to become a professional writer was stick with it and not quit.”
Stick with it she did. After graduating in 1995, Kritzer moved to Minneapolis with her future husband and worked as a tech writer. Every evening after work, she would work on her writing, and eventually finished her first novel.
In 2000, life changed for Kritzer. “I sold my first novel when my older child was a year old. Right around the time I discovered I was pregnant with my second, I sold a trilogy [to a publishing house] on proposal. So that meant I had three years to write three books.”
An intense three years of balancing her work as both a stay-at-home mother and writer followed.
She wrote the first novel in the trilogy while pregnant with her second child and parenting a two-year-old, and turned in the manuscript a month before she was due. “I got my editorial notes in email on the day that my water broke, with a note from the editor saying: ‘Do you think you can have these changes back to me in two weeks?’,” said Kritzer. “I emailed her literally while leaking and was like, ‘absolutely not.’”
She wrote the second book while caring for a preschooler and a newborn. “I would take the older kid to preschool and drop them off, and then I would come home and try to get the baby to nap. And if the baby napped, I would drop absolutely everything and do nothing but write,” said Kritzer.
When writing the final book of the trilogy, Kritzer’s younger child began resisting naps unless driven in a car. “So I would drive down the road until she fell asleep, and then I would pull over into a parking lot and take out my laptop, lean it against the steering wheel and type,” remembered Kritzer.
“The ergonomics of this were terrible,” said Kritzer. “Honestly, I think 90% of the men in this position would have arranged for daycare… and in retrospect, that’s what I should have done. Because while it makes a good story, it was kind of an unhinged way to write a book.”
Kritzer successfully turned in her trilogy. The series, however, did not initially sell well. Combined with the stresses the Great Recession placed on publishing houses, Kritzer was unable to sell any other books for ten years.
Still, Kritzer stuck with it. She wrote two more novels but was unable to sell them, and began writing a series of short stories, which were published in science fiction magazines.
In 2016, things turned around for Kritzer when her short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, widely considered the top literary science fiction award, and the Locus Award for Best Short Story.
Soon, publishing group Tor Teen asked her to write a novel based on “Cat Pictures Please,” and Kritzer broke back into the novel world. She has since published two more novels and several collections of short stories.
“OBSTETRIX,” which will be released next month, is about an “obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want somebody to deliver their babies” who must figure out how to escape and bring help to the girls in the compound. The book begins when an obstetrician-gynecologist (OBGYN) is recently acquitted for performing the last abortion in North Dakota, and leaves her state in fear, looking for a new job.
“That started with me thinking about the ramifications of anti-abortion legislation — [there is] the prosecution of women, but also there are a lot of states that have lost a huge percentage of their OBGYNs,” said Kritzer. She wondered, “What if one of the states where abortion was illegal decided to deal with this by kidnapping doctors?” Eventually, she shifted her idea from a kidnapping state to a fundamentalist cult.
“I think pretty much all science fiction and fantasy is about the world the writer lives in,” said Kritzer. “As much as it is about whatever future they’re writing about, or past imagined world that they’re thinking of, I think we all very much write about the present as much as anything else.”
In addition to her creative writing, Kritzer engages with politics through her political blog, where she creates election guides for Minneapolis and St. Paul.
After a 1994 primary election where the attorney general candidate Sharon Anderson, who Kritzer described as “delusional, racist, anti-Semitic, [and] unhinged,” unexpectedly won the Republican primaries, Kritzer began considering the lack of education around local candidates. She described the speculation around why Anderson won over endorsed Republican candidates — she had a Scandinavian-sounding name, there was a TV reporter with a similar name or it was just because she was a woman.
“After that, every time I would go to vote… there would be a bunch of races that I didn’t know anything about,” said Kritzer, listing the library board and soil and water commissioners as examples. “I would get there and I would think, ‘I could just vote for the people with the female names.’ And then I would remember Sharon and I wouldn’t.”
So in 2006, Kritzer found the online ballot ahead of voting, researched each candidate, took notes in a LiveJournal post and posted it publicly. She did this each year, with a leap in popularity during a 36-candidate mayoral election in 2013.
“Local politics matter a lot, but they’re not always covered well in the press because newspapers are under pressure. They’ve had their budgets cut, their staff fired,” said Kritzer. “And [local elected positions] really matter.”
Paired with her endorsement work, Kritzer also strongly believes in the imaginative political power of science fiction and fantasy.
“I feel like it’s worth saying, here’s a future we can have. And it’s worth saying, here’s a future we don’t want, and this is what happened to get people there. And it’s also worth saying, here’s where we are,” said Kritzer.