New issue! Stefon Mears, Kavitha Rath, Abigail Nussbaum

Hi all,

We kick off February with Stefon Mears' story "Conjure Man", lost in the forest:

Heath tried to keep the glare of his pocket L.E.D flashlight on the loose dirt trail in front of him. Hard to keep it still when the canopy of maples above completely cut off the full moon's shine. His single circle of light provided the only break in the complete darkness all around.

A darkness full of creaks and groans and rustles. As though the forest were a single huge entity, and it had Heath surrounded. Made the humid air closer, despite the relative cool of the July evening.

Plus a poem by Kavitha Rath, Abigail Nussbaum on Ayize Jama-Everett (and the problems with other superhero stories), and later in the week, reviews of Rose Lemberg's poetry and Dave Hutchinson's Europe at Midnight.

It's been a busy few weeks behind the scenes here,  as I think I've alluded to before. The most pressing business this week, though, is that we're now past the deadline to apply for the proofreader, articles editor and associate editor positions we advertised, so we're sorting through all the responses as fast as we can -- we're aiming to get back to everyone who applied for a proofreading position within 48 hours, and to everyone else by this time next week. But there are a lot of strong applicants, so we'll see how it goes. 

On another front, we'd already been planning a couple of special issues to run later this year -- no details yet, watch this space -- but our plans got an unexpected but welcome boost last week, thanks to a chunky anonymous donation that came in via Benevity. So on the off-chance the donor is reading this, thank you! It's made a big difference to our plans for this year, and I've been sending out emails left and right over the past few days, trying to get various ducks in a row.

And I think that's it from me this week. Oh, except to say to those of you who are fiction writers that we re-opened to submissions today --send us your best!

-- Niall