Announcing Our 2020 Guest Editors

We just sent off the October issue of Fireside Quarterly to press, which means that we’re now hard at work on the 2020 issues, so it’s time to talk a little about what we’re planning for next year.

First, a name change. Starting in 2020, we’ll be adjusting the nomenclature we use for Fireside Quarterly, since using months to refer to both the quarterly print issues and the monthly ebook issues is confusing. (No one should ever have to parse the sentence “The August issue of Fireside Magazine, our monthly ebook edition, includes stories from the July issue of Fireside Quarterly, our print edition.” That’s just asking for confusion.) Instead of using months to identify the four issues of Fireside Quarterly in a year, we’ll now be using the seasons: starting in 2020, the Winter issue will ship in January, the Spring issue will ship in April, the Summer issue will ship in July, and the Autumn issue will ship in October. Monthly ebook editions will retain their numbering and continue to track with the months of the year.

And now, for the big news! As I announced in the spring, starting in January of 2020, each new issue of Fireside Quarterly will have a different guest editor, who will acquire stories and work with authors to develop them, and it’s time to announce who those guest editors will be! So without further ado:

The Winter 2020 issue of Fireside Quarterly is being guest edited by Dominik Parisien. Dominik is the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Mythic Dream, Robots vs Fairies, and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, the latter of which won the Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. He also co-edited Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with our erstwhile managing editor, Elsa Sjunneson. His poetry chapbook We, Old Young Ones was published by Frog Hollow Press through its Dis/Ability series. Dominik’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Quill & Quire, The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Uncanny Magazine, and Strange Horizons, as well as other magazines and anthologies. He is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

The Spring 2020 issue of Fireside Quarterly is being guest edited by L. D. Lewis. You may know L as a founding creator, art director, and project manager for the Hugo Award-nominated FIYAH Literary Magazine, as well as one of the driving forces behind the POB Score Project, the BSF Writer Survey, and a crucial collaborator on our own #BlackSpecFic Reports. She’s also an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer in her own right.

The Summer 2020 issue of Fireside Quarterly will be guest edited by Kate Dollarhyde. Kate is a WGA-nominated writer of speculative fiction. Her stories have been published in Fireside Magazine, Lackington’s Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other magazines. She is also a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment, where’s she’s working on the retro-futuristic RPG The Outer Worlds. She was formerly the editor-in-chief of the short fiction magazine Strange Horizons. She lives in California.

The Autumn 2020 issue of Fireside Quarterly will be guest edited by Maurice Broaddus. A community organizer and teacher, Maurice’s work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance Magazine, and Uncanny Magazine, and collections such as The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk novella Buffalo Soldier, the steampunk novel Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novel The Usual Suspects. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Dark Faith: Invocations, Streets of Shadows, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror, and Apex Magazine.

I’ve been working with Dominik and L for a few months now for the Winter and Spring 2020 issues, respectively, and we’re about to ramp up production for the Summer 2020 issue with Kate, starting with our upcoming submissions period for the Summer issue later this month. It’s no exaggeration to say that working with these fine folks has so far been one of the most positive, rewarding, and educational experiences of my life in publishing, and I’m so, so keen to keep going down this new editorial path for Fireside. I’ll have much more to say on the matter of editors and the state of the industry over the next few months but, for now, I’d like to end on a hearty welcome to our 2020 editors. I’m looking forward to sharing the fruits of their hard work with you all in the new year.

As always, thanks for reading!

© 2019 Pablo Defendini

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