You can now preorder The Wildcraft Drones!

Stelliform Press published the pre-order page for my debut solarpunk collection this morning, and I’m so excited to share it with you!

The premise for this world first came to me a decade ago, and since then, the stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Tractor Beam, Reckoning, Roses & Wildflowers, and one of them was even a finalist in Grist’s Imagine 2200 contest. Plus, there’s a handful of new ones I wrote just for this book. What a road it’s been, I can’t wait to hold this in my hands when it comes out on May 21st. It’s my first book! More announcements to come about the launch and tour dates!

“Haunting Beauty” nominated for a Pushcart Prize

Also this morning (yeah it was pretty hard to focus at work today), Uncharted Magazine announced their Pushcart nominations, and I’m so honored that my story is in the picks! This was SO unexpected! More on that story below.

2025 Recap

It’s award nominations season, and I had a few stories published this year that are eligible, if you are inclined to such things. If not, it’s just a list, I guess, but there’s bugs and trees and dolphins in it, so I think that makes it a good list?

“To Plant an Oak in Sand” is a flash fiction piece about rewilding a lawn, inspired by my own efforts on my dad’s yard in Florida (hi Dad!). Reckoning Magazine published it in January. It gave them feelings. It gives me feelings every time I re-read it. It kind of sneaks up on you.

“The Rings of Ferocina” is another very short story, about encountering another human on another planet, in an era where our kind is rare but we still have a bunch of baggage about each other. It was the first story I wrote after attending the Clarion writers workshop. Factor Four Magazine published it in February.

“The Flowers Where 580 Used To Be” showed up in Tractor Beam in March, and it’s also in my forthcoming collection, The Wildcraft Drones. It’s a love story — my first attempt at an outright romance plot. College girls from very different socioeconomic backgrounds meet at a soil remediation site, drama ensues, I cried writing it, some people have told me it also made them cry, this is no guarantee that it will make you cry. But if you like that kind of thing you might like this story. Oh, also, holy shit, Tractor Beam had it ANNOTATED by SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS, because they are so fucking extra like that. That’s a first for me and it was so cool working with them, and also the illustrations and overall execution is absolutely gorgeous.

“Haunting Beauty” is being nominated for a motherfucking Pushcart Prize by Uncharted Magazine, which I never expected in a hundred gazillion years. This short story is one of my more autobiographical, inspired by experiences modeling for photographer Todd Hido in the early 2000s. In real life, there were no ghosts, that I know of, but this is a ghost story, and very much about the Tenderloin. Uncharted published it in April. It’s the first story of mine that has ever been nominated for anything ever. I truly would never have guessed it would be this one, but I do think it’s doing something important. You’ll have to read it to find out what.

“The Park of the Beast” is a little solarpunk prose poem I wrote for a reading at Happy Endings in San Francisco, and it was published in the Bright Green Futures anthology in April. You can get the actual physical anthology at Dog Eared Books or Cafe Suspiro in San Francisco, or order whatever format you like from the publisher, Susan Kaye Quinn, host of the Bright Green Futures podcast (which is also really good). “The Park of the Beast” is about my current neighborhood, SoMa, and also about a monster. And about dumb shit the City of San Francisco does just to spite its own face.

“Centipede Station” also appeared in the Bright Green Futures anthology, and if I was someone else exactly like me considering what to nominate for awards this year, I would definitely be considering this one because it’s a poignant grief-processing space adventure full of GIANT BUGS that takes place on a mysterious space station MADE OF TREES. I don’t know what else would convince anyone, but I also don’t always understand people. (LMK if you can’t do the paywalls on any of these, btw.)

“Banded Iron” is the one where I was like “this one, this one is the best one” when I sent it off, but that’s famously a shit metric for knowing whether anyone else will like a thing or not. Anyway, I wrote it for all of us in the arts and sciences who are living through batshit fucking insane times and struggling with the question of wtf we should be doing about that while we’re getting defunded and pissed on by idiots. It’s about a geology intern. And about rocks. And about giant space monsters, and their previous victims. The setting was inspired in part by my own internship at Dinosaur National Monument, back in my paleontology days. I wrote it because The Sunday Morning Transport asked me for a story, and they told me I could write about anything, so I wrote about rocks. It was published in June. I love this story. You might. I don’t know.

Not eligible for awards, but still awesome: “Squawker and Dolphin Swimming Together” is being reprinted in a lovely and important anthology from Reckoning Magazine called A Chorus, Divergent, which is all reprints from neurodiverse authors, in response to the mindboggling dumbfuckery of certain United States health officials. The ebook is available now, and you can pre-order the print anthology from Reckoning or at your local independent bookstore. You can also just read the story online, but it would be most awesome of you to support this anthology with a pre-order at your local independent bookstore. If you missed this story the first time around, it’s about a near-future team of scientists trying to make a breakthrough in dolphin communication, before climate chaos makes their work impossible.

Phew, that was a lot. Thank you for being on this weird ass journey with me, writing is so strange. It’s better with friends.

Til next time,

T. K. Rex