First, a big thank you to everyone who contributed to or signal-boosted our Kickstarter this year, or supported us in other ways. We met and exceeded our goals, so you can look forward to special issues next year on topics including Wuxia, Caribbean SFF, and Childbearing. Our Fund Drive 2022 Special Issue is now completely unlocked. Enjoy it at your leisure.

In other big news, we are excited to add Lisa M. Bradley, Ian Finch, and Vanessa Jae to our poetry editing team! Thanks to our recent fund drive, we’ll be continuing double poems through 2023, and now we’ll have an expanded department with which to do it. Here’s a little bit about the new editors who will be reading and selecting poems alongside AJ, Romie, and Timothy:

A queer Latina living in Iowa, Lisa M. Bradley writes everything from haiku to novels, usually with a speculative slant. Most recently her work has appeared in LeVar Burton Reads, Lightspeed, Mermaids Monthly, and Fantasy Magazine. Her first collection is The Haunted Girl; her debut novel is Exile. She edited Uncanny Magazine’s special issue “Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.”

She also coedited with R.B. Lemberg the Ursula K. Le Guin tribute poetry anthology, Climbing Lightly Through Forests. On Twitter, she’s @cafenowhere. Learn more at www.lisambradley.com.

Ian Finch (aka Nonpolygon) is a poet and designer based in Kentucky, USA. Their work is part visual poetry, part speculative biology, and part barbarian/wizard multiclass, and they have appeared in Diagram, Rattle, Otoliths, Pelt, Four Minutes to Midnight, Mad Hatters’ Review, and elsewhere. More at www.nonpolygon.com.

Vanessa Jae writes horrifically beautiful anarchies and collects black hoodies and bruises in mosh pits on Tuesday nights. To read tweets by interesting people, follow her at @thevanessajae.

All of the new editors wrote their own bios, and all of them are significantly underselling themselves. We encourage you to click on the links to Lisa’s and Ian’s websites, which are full of cool stuff and still don’t tell the whole story. And you may recognize Vanessa Jae’s name from a poem of hers we recently published, “the fear of cyborgs to believe in flesh.”

We feel very lucky to have all of the new editors on board.

Let it also be said that many other applicants for the position were exceptional. We feel very good about the future of speculative poetry here and in other magazines, some of which haven’t been founded yet.

Alas, we are also saying goodbye (at least for now) to the outstanding poetry editor Sydney Hilton, who started with Strange Horizons as a first reader in the fiction department before co-helming the poetry department for the last two years. From outside the magazine, it’s hard to see exactly which editor is responsible for what—we do that on purpose—but the poems Syd guided through acceptance and publication included memorable standouts like “The Bunny Man,” by David Simmons, and “Sunday Funnies,” by Stella Wong.

Syd is stepping aside to focus on teaching, and we doubt anybody has heard the last of them (in a good way). Aside from being a discerning editor, Syd was a thoughtful colleague with strong opinions and a generous spirit. We would have kept them around forever if we could have. Consider this a permanent recommendation.

This post has been focused on (and is coming from) the poetry department, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t note the magazine is also bidding farewell this week to longtime fiction editor Vajra Chandrasekera, who has gotten very busy writing fiction! You can read Vajra’s eloquent goodbyes and intriguing teases for upcoming projects in this Twitter thread.