Jun 3, 2021 | announcement

Announcing our next guest editor: Hal Y. Zhang

by Brian J. White

We are super excited to announce that Hal Y. Zhang will be the guest editor for our next submissions period, which will run from July 5 through July 11, 2021.

Hal Y. Zhang is a lapsed physicist who splits her time between the east coast of the United States and the Internet. Her prose and poetry are at Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Future Tense, and Fireside Magazine, and she is on the editorial staff at Reckoning. Her language-and-loss chapbook, AMNESIA (Newfound, 2020), won the Eric Hoffer Micro Press Award, and her women-with-sharp-things collection, Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Arms, was published by Aqueduct Press. She is online at halyzhang.com and @halyzhang.

Hal will be accepting both short stories and poetry for three monthly issues that will be published in 2022. She would especially love to see work loosely themed around science and technology: the joy of discovery, the systemic barriers in place that prevent equal access to advanced knowledge, and how new tools and machines can both empower and disenfranchise marginalized voices. Don’t limit yourself to strictly future settings or science fiction — think broadly in terms of any method or system that explores the world through experimentation, such as an ancient sorcerer investigating rules of magic.

Each writer can submit one short story and one poem during this submissions period. Please read our general submission guidelines for more information about things like story length and what we do and don’t accept. When submissions open, the link to submit will be on that page as well. You can sign up for our newsletter if you’d like a reminder when we open (as well as weekly stories in your inbox), and we’ll also post a reminder on Twitter.

Get those stories and poems ready! We can’t wait to see what y’all send in.

© 2021 Brian J. White

About the author

Brian started Fireside Fiction Company in 2012 as an experiment in crowdfunding and paying speculative fiction writers well above the accepted professional rate at the time. It worked! Thanks, have a great day!

Brian has been informed he has to write more in his bio. Fine! Brian took that experiment through five Kickstarters (and did not die!) and into a subscription model. During his tenure, Fireside published 150 stories, five novels, and one novella, and also published the first #BlackSpecFic report, which examined the massive under-representation of Black short-story writers in the field, prompting conversation, reflection, and change in the speculative fiction community. It remains one of the most important things he has worked on in his adult life. Brian was a 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Non-Professional category for Fireside, and Fireside has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards.

Facing the burnout that is all too common among people who work at small presses, Brian stepped down as editor and publisher in 2017 to regroup and recharge mentally. He returned as interim editorial director in 2020 and resumed full ownership of the company in June 2021 with a great team you can read about below.

In the wider world, Brian is a former journalist who worked as an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville from 2006–2010 and at the Boston Globe from 2010–2018, where he was part of the staff that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2014 for the newspaper’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2014. He still lives around Boston, where he works as an editor for a private company and takes photographs, paints miniatures, and spends time with his amazing wife and various cats.