Dear Strange Horizons readers,

The Fiction department is pleased to announce that we will reopen to submissions January 2, 2017. We look forward to reading your excellent stories.

Over the course of our long hiatus, we've made several changes to the Fiction department beyond the addition of the skilled Vajra Chandrasekera as a Fiction Editor. First, and most importantly, we've brought on several new first readers. As we read the Fireside Report and looked at the demographics of our department, we realized that we needed to actively recruit black readers to our staff, and we hope that our new additions will help us in our mission to find the best and most inclusive speculative fiction. Please take a moment to look at our staff page if you're interested in our first readers.

Second, we're rolling out a new submissions system for both Fiction and Poetry. We're taking the rest of December to test the system and train our first readers, and we hope its debut goes smoothly for everyone involved. We'd like to thank Matthew Kressel for designing the system, which a number of magazines use and which will greatly streamline our work. We also heartily thank Jed Hartman, who has donated server space and database help to the magazine for years.

Finally, as a result of this year’s fund drive, in the new year we will be opening submissions to Samovar, an imprint for translated SF run by Sarah Dodd, Laura Friis, Greg West, and Helen Marshall, in association with the University of Leeds and Anglia Ruskin University. You can expect to hear more from them about what Samovar will be looking for and how to submit very soon.

We appreciate your patience as we make these changes. We can't wait to read some astonishing fiction in the coming months!

Vajra Chandrasekera, Lila Garrott, Catherine Krahe, An Owomoyela