Uncanny Magazine

It’s that time of year! Here are my award eligible poems and short stories published in 2025. Thank you! I’m grateful for any and all consideration. ❤️

@strangehorizons.bsky.social @uncannymagazine.bsky.social @trollbreathmag.bsky.social @plotthoundmag.bsky.social
@crayfishmag.bsky.social

The High Priestess Writes a Love Letter to The Magician - Uncanny Magazine Your magick is this:            kindness and shadow, fireflies of hope                        burning like embers—            everything you touch signs a raven song, a fairytale,            a reminde...

Maybe your day could use something pretty?

"The High Priestess Writes a Love Letter to The Magician" appeared in @uncannymagazine.bsky.social last year, and it's a poem I'm incredibly proud of.

If you haven't read it, you're in luck:

www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-...

Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Seven - Uncanny Magazine Welcome to Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Seven! All of the content will be available for purchase as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) on November 4, 2025. The free online content will be released in two stag...

Check it out!

www.uncannymagazine.com/issues/uncan...

ICYMI
my @uncannymagazine.bsky.social debut will go live on their site December 2 or it’s available right the fuck now if you buy the current issue (67) or subscribe! I wrote an essay about xmas horror movies and a percieved shift from societal horror to the aesthetic of the fantastic.

Pass it on

Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Seven - Uncanny Magazine Welcome to Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Seven! All of the content will be available for purchase as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) on November 4, 2025. The free online content will be released in two stag...

Also while I'm here giving reading recs, this month's @uncannymagazine.bsky.social is absolute fire. Anémona by Ana Hurtado, And on Their Graves a Fall of Angels by Natalia Theodoridou, and Thicker by Eleanna Castroianni are some of the absolute best of 2025

www.uncannymagazine.com/issues/uncan...

Interviews Archives - Uncanny Magazine

The archive of past @uncannymagazine.bsky.social interviews is here:

www.uncannymagazine.com/type/intervi...

Reading stories for print interviews in the Jan/Feb issue of @uncannymagazine.bsky.social...which kicks off my 9th (!!!) year as Uncanny Magazine's interviewer!

Grateful to have had the opportunity to chat with so many fabulous authors about ideas, influences, & writing process over the years! :)

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YouTube video by kenneth anderson Pay Me My Money Down - Georgia Sea Island Singers

2!

“Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan” marked the first time I was shortlisted for an award. Also reprinted in BASFF and Best British Fantasy.

Fun fact: Manumitted slaves often chose surnames based on their trades. John Wood was a carpenter.

Song pairing: m.youtube.com/watch?v=iPvZ...

YouTube video by AlaniVEVO ALA.NI - Darkness at Noon (Official Video)

5!

“The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste:” inspired by an 11 day stint in Glasgow Royal Infirmary for hypercalcaemia. GRI looks out onto the cathedral and necropolis.

Fun fact: i didn’t know about Percy Shelley’s heart when I wrote this.

Song pairing: m.youtube.com/watch?v=CAZ1...

YouTube video by MahaliaJacksonVEVO Mahalia Jackson - Trouble of the World (Audio)

6!

“If Salt Lose its Savor” is about the cost of doing the right thing.

Fun fact: the reason that there was only one client for the salt is because the empire the Beaucourt served had crushed or subsumed any competing clients

Song Pairing: m.youtube.com/watch?v=IHOg...

YouTube video by Sub Pop Orville Peck - Dead of Night [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

Call and Response Fun Fact Countdown! 10!

We open with “Femme and Sundance,” queer hustlers turned bank robbers with magical complications.

Fun Fact: the diner in the opening, mean patrons, nasty bathroom, and all resembles a real one in Nebraska.

Song pairing: m.youtube.com/watch?v=q3es...

“Stasis” is a portrait painted by the artist Zara Alfonso, and is the first piece in her series about invisible illness. A portrait painting of a girl with skin so pale she’s almost translucent, her lips are tinged blue and she gazes upward through seemingly unseeing eyes. Pale moths and winged insects cover the expanse of her face and body, blending into her skin in places.

I’m really excited to share that I won the Frank R. Paul Award for Best Magazine Cover Art! My painting Stasis, a self-portrait about invisible illness, was featured on the cover of Uncanny Magazine Issue 58 🖤

#art #painting #portrait #illustration

The Year Without Sunshine - Uncanny Magazine During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civi...

THE YEAR WITHOUT SUNSHINE by @naomikritzer.bsky.social in @uncannymagazine.bsky.social

www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-...

The Millay Illusion - Uncanny Magazine For the whole of the year that I now look back on as the best of my life, Susanna Miller’s act began twenty-three minutes after mine ended. I went first, to warm up the crowd, followed by the dog trai...

"The Millay Illusion," by @sarahpinsker.bsky.social.

This was a magical story, and I would have happily spent way more time with Lottie and Susanna.

#labyrinthratreads2025

www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-...

There have been portals to the Fae realm for at least as long as humans have had fairy tales, but the first one deliberately engineered by humans was opened in an abandoned amusement park thirty-five miles northeast of Antiphony. The historic event was observed from a safe distance by a team of army engineers, with military reinforcements on standby in case anything went wrong. It was also observed from a significantly closer vantage point by Jolene Kestrel, who absolutely should not have been in the park that day. Jolene was by far the most promising student at Costa Nova University’s prestigious School of Architecture, Class of 2056. She’d entered the park shortly after dawn, illegally, through a hole in the rusty chain-link fence. For several hours—hyperfocused on her work and utterly unaware of what was about to unfold—she sat in a dilapidated bumper car and sketched endless variations on the ivy-covered steel curves of the largest roller coaster in the park, searching for the seeds of an architectural innovation that could someday be the cornerstone of her legacy.

"Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War," by @carolinemyoachim.bsky.social is a neat blend of fantasy and science fiction and found fiction--time bubbles and stasis fields and generation ships, Oh my!

www.uncannymagazine.com/article/unfi...

#labyrinthratreads2025

The Mourning Robot - Uncanny Magazine They came with machetes asked if we knew the way to Wonderland.   We were built to love the dead, to open our mouths and sing praise to broken   bones, hands over our eyes, aluminum sheets over our he...

This is also the 1st year for a Nebula Award for Poetry! I had 5 poems out this year, but here are my favorites:

1) The Mourning Robot @uncannymagazine.bsky.social
uncannymagazine.com/article/the-...

2) The Church at the Edge of Time @strangehorizons.bsky.social
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

Monitoring My Mind: MST3K and Me - Uncanny Magazine (Content note: This essay contains descriptions of child abuse.) Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) was, for those who don’t know, a show that aired in the 80s and 90s. It aired on a lot of differen...

Since today marks 37 years of #MST3K, here's the essay that @eilatan.bsky.social wrote about it for Uncanny Magazine: Monitoring My Mind: MST3K and Me - Uncanny Magazine share.google/nvQNg25EOrTk...

I know Frankenstein's all the rage right now, so maaaaybe you'd like this poem of mine, published in @uncannymagazine.bsky.social -- A Lovesong From Frankenstein's Monster:

www.uncannymagazine.com/article/love...

cover of issue 58, titled "Stasis" by Zara Alfonso depicts a brown gray background and a femme-presenting person with long dark hair staring up into space. Her eyes are glazed over white and her lips (and overall complexion) is a gray-blue-white. Moths of a pale-gray-blue-white rest on her face and shoulder

Congratulations to Zara Alfonso! Zara's 2024 Uncanny Magazine cover "Stasis" won the 2025 Frank R. Paul Best Magazine Cover Art Award! buff.ly/MRSHKuq

2025 Frank R. Paul Awards Winners locusmag.com/2025/11...

Breakout, Ripoff, Genre: How Fiction Outgrows Originality - Uncanny Magazine Doom is a lot like Lord of the Rings, which is a lot like Superman. You don’t have to admit you loved Doom. In fact, you can pretend you never even heard of this videogame about a floating gun that sh...

Breakout, Ripoff, Genre is an essay I wanted to write for years. It's how reductive ideas of originality hold many writers back, and about where inspiration really comes from. The great works are all in conversation with something.

You can read it for free at @uncannymagazine.bsky.social!

Can I slip mine in before the deadlines?

Wend-Way-Go - Uncanny Magazine My no-account cousin Keif (short for Keifer) rolled up to the house that afternoon in a battered old mustard-colored car of no discernible make or model. Keif was in his forties, about a dozen years y...

Absolutely charmed by this @timpratt.org story at @uncannymagazine.bsky.social.
www.uncannymagazine.com/article/wend...

And on Their Graves a Fall of Angels - Uncanny Magazine He was ten when he shot his first angel. He remembers its stupid dark eyes staring at him from the foliage above, its two sets of wings flapping, the sound of something breaking. It was shortly after ...

A beautiful and melancholic story of people looking for meaning in the face of chaos and companionship in the face of cruelty. How would you live in a world full of fallen angels, when miracles seem impossible?

by @nassos.bsky.social in @uncannymagazine.bsky.social

Yeah, this week's It's Storytime, Swarm X1048 - Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris, '6'" by F.E. Choe, is a beautiful story that sneaks up, quietly slips its hand around your heart, and squeezes it until you think it's going to break.

I love that so many listeners love it, too.

The cover for Uncanny Magazine Issue 67, "Mushroom Mother of Us All" by Paul Lewin. In the center, an elderly Black woman has her eyes serenely closed, a brown-orange nose piercing on her right nostril and an orange line/mark on her chin. Her hair are the green leaves of trees, trunks growing out of the side of her face, and mushrooms growing through the leaves. She wears large earrings of orange, sienna, with aqua and white lines and dots. Her hands hold a bowl lined with Black faces and mushrooms growing out of the bowl. In the center of the bowl and thus the front of her chest is an orange sun surrounded by a dark pink halo like a globe. The quote reads: “The other chicken, a bright yellow affair, had a smaller chicken sitting on her back and four holes piercing her breast. Through those holes, Big Yellow’s voice emanated, ‘She is late.’ Red and Black’s glazed eye glinted with annoyance. ‘Quiet. She will be here in a moment.’”

ICYMI! Reading 2025 fiction?

Try the short story "To Speak in Silence" by Mary Robinette Kowal @maryrobinettekowal.com!

You can read it in the eBooks now & on the website in December!

buff.ly/CmvWUOr

The cover for Uncanny Magazine Issue 67, "Mushroom Mother of Us All" by Paul Lewin. In the center, an elderly Black woman has her eyes serenely closed, a brown-orange nose piercing on her right nostril and an orange line/mark on her chin. Her hair are the green leaves of trees, trunks growing out of the side of her face, and mushrooms growing through the leaves. She wears large earrings of orange, sienna, with aqua and white lines and dots. Her hands hold a bowl lined with Black faces and mushrooms growing out of the bowl. In the center of the bowl and thus the front of her chest is an orange sun surrounded by a dark pink halo like a globe. The quote reads: "Where mother was born, fish sing, algae dance. They say that when the waters lower you can feel the swell between your organs—liver bloated, heart submerged. Mother always goes back in years of drought. This time is Vassia’s first. 'I’m so glad you’ll finally see our home.'"

ICYMI! Reading 2025 fiction?

Try the short story "Thicker" by Eleanna Castroianni @ecastroianni.bsky.social!

You can read it in the eBooks now & on the website in December!

buff.ly/CmvWUOr

The cover for Uncanny Magazine Issue 67, "Mushroom Mother of Us All" by Paul Lewin. In the center, an elderly Black woman has her eyes closed, a-orange nose piercing on her right nostril and line/mark on her chin. Her hair are green leaves, trunks growing out of the side of her face, and mushrooms growing through the leaves. She wears earrings of orange, sienna, with aqua & white lines & dots. Her hands hold a bowl lined with Black faces & mushrooms growing out of the bowl. In the center of the bowl & thus the front of her chest is an orange sun with a dark pink halo like a globe. The quote reads: "The first time Kittu teleported was into the lavatory of a plane bound for London, fifteen seconds before it crashed in a field south of Gatwick. One moment she was brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror in her apartment in Toronto, wishing she had the money to go on vacation, and the next moment she was thrown upward, hitting the ceiling of a tiny, smelly, enclosed space."

ICYMI! Reading 2025 fiction?

Try the short story "The Teleporting Disaster Fairy" by Rati Mehrotra @rati.bsky.social!

You can read it in the eBooks now & on the website in December!

buff.ly/CmvWUOr