2023 Awards Eligibility Post

Good morning! Since we’re approaching the end of the year, I thought I’d throw together my Awards Eligibility post for 2023 a bit earlier than usual. This will be a living post, so I’ll update it if I have any new works published or edited between now and the end of 2023!

Eligible Works

Stories & Translations

“Cavities” (ORIGINAL STORY – 198 words, February 2023)
Published in the anthology OOZE: Little Bursts of Body Horror, this micro-fiction about sacrifice was inspired by some of my own dental misadventures. Ooze‘s editor, Ruth Anna Evans, pushed me to make the ending stronger, and some of my writing buddies in The Dread Machine‘s Discord helped me come up with the final product! ^_^

“History of a Piano in Spacetime” by Isis Aquino (ORIGINAL TRANSLATION – 1,080 words, September 2023)
My first published translation of the year! “History of a Piano in Spacetime” was published in MAYDAY Magazine and follows the history of a piano from the 1868 through 2028 in the Dominican Republic, featuring themes of family, hardship, corruption, and the paranormal. I fell in love with this story when I first read it in Supraversum (defunct) because of how skillfully Isis wove her country’s identity and history throughout the piece.

“Phoenix” (ORIGINAL STORY – 1,978 words, February 2023)
Published by After the Storm Magazine, “Phoenix” is a queer historical fiction/romance about two female hotshot firefighters wrapping up their 3-month rotation fighting the Wallowa-Whitman wildfire of 1973. I loved working on this story, and ended up going down quite the research rabbit hole as I did my background research for it! (Research findings/write-up here –> https://molo-writes.com/2022/04/13/research-rabbit-hole-female-hotshot-firefighters-in-1973/)

“The Clementine of Enlightenment” (ORIGINAL STORY – 987 words, June 2023)
Published by Scrawl Place, a magazine that features writing tied to very specific places, “The Clementine of Enlightenment” is a fantasy story (95% realism, 5% fantasy) set on the Maryland Heights Trail at Harpers Ferry, WV. The protagonist, who’s having relationship troubles, goes for a hike and encounters a strange woman who presents them with a chance at enlightenment—but turns it down!

“The Desire, Death, and Dance of the Planet Aysudalit” (ORIGINAL STORY – 2,395 words, June 2023)
Published by Archive of the Odd, “The Desire, Death, and Dance of the Planet Aysudalit” is a science fiction story about first contact between humanity and a sentient water planet—after the humans have already begun lobotomizing it! The narrative structure is framed by the first-person experiences of the planet Aysudalit, with interspersed interview excerpts provided by a human expeditionary diplomat, a biomechanical hybrid biologist, the expeditionary ship’s commander, and the ship’s sentry system.

“The Three Tests” by David Mancera (ORIGINAL TRANSLATION – 4,935 words, October 2023)
Published by Futura House, “The Three Tests” is a dark fantasy in the tradition of the Arabian Nights, featuring three stories within a story that all come together as they explore themes of love, time travel, family, and revenge. The original Spanish-language version of this story (“Las tres pruebas”) was a finalist for Spain’s Domingo Santos Award in 2021 and was published by El Transbordador in 2022!

Poetry

“Picture This” (POEM – 24 lines, March 2023)
Haven Speculative Magazine published my only poem of the year! I crafted this poem by patching together several poems that I’d originally drafted separately, focusing on beach and coastal imagery as a unifying theme.

NON-FICTIOn

“Sonnets, Silhouettes, and Secrets” (ESSAY – 1,455 words, Summer 2023)
This summer, Oh Reader published my personal essay in which I use the annotations that I discovered in a second-hand edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From The Portuguese (from the early 1930s) as a lens for examining my own experiences as a queer high schooler. The annotations reveal two women’s secrets and the unrequited love that one of them felt for the other, who was soon to be married.

Editing

Darkness Blooms (ANTHOLOGY – co-edited, May 2023)
Published by The Dread Machine and co-edited with Alin Walker, this anthology features 17 dark speculative fiction tales exploring the themes of identity, security, and community, as well as cover art by Yorgos Cotronis. My favorite part of every anthology project (after we’ve picked the stories we’ll be including) is figuring out which order to put them in, and I had a blast with this one!

The Dread Machine (MAGAZINE – co-edited, 2023)
This was my last year co-editing The Dread Machine with Alin Walker and Tim Burkhardt. We reviewed thousands of dread-inspiring stories and poems, working hard to bring you only the best pieces! Each issue features cover art by Yorgos Cotronis.

Bionautas by Cristina Jurado (NOVEL – copy edited, Oct. 2023 – present)
This year, I’ve been working with Cristina Jurado to copy edit her English translation of her Ignotus Award-winning novel Bionautas. Cristina’s translation is now being serialized by Twine Stories!

THANK YOU!!!

Thank you to all who published, read, critiqued, and otherwise supported my writing in 2023! Extra gratitude goes, as always, to those who spread the word about my work — I’m terrible at marketing, and despite spending this year improving my self-promotion skills, I’ve still got a long way to go!

PS: I’ll post my annual year-in-review post sometime next month!