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Award Eligibility 2025

The cover of The Dark Issue 127 depicts a pale figure with shadowed eyes and dark hair, wrapped in barbed wire. They stare outward at the viewer with their arms crossed over their chest. The background suggests snow and cold.

Here’s what all I did this year and where you can find it!

Wolf Moon, Antler Moon, Reactor, January 2025 (14,000 words – novelette/long fiction)

She can’t stop seeing them—the doe-girl skins hanging from the wall, turned inside out, cut and changed so the girls could never find their way inside them again.

Slay the Princess, Save the Dragon, Secret Romantic’s Book of Magic (Titan), June 2025 (7,000 words – short story)

The air here smelled like asphalt and identical houses, strip malls and parking lots and, of course, the plant itself – the stink of disappointment and failure. The plant where Ev’s mother had spent her days, and now spent her nights. The plant where Ev’s future lay, too, the only possible one she could see.

Her Shadow, Nailed to the Floor, 3-Lobed Burning Eye, July 2025 (2,874 words – short story)

We stand outside the schoolhouse, a huddle of uncertain birds, a collective knot of shoulders bowed low by grief. We, the parents of the children who are gone. 

Sick, Vampire Hunters: An Incomplete Record (Speculation Press), July 2025 (2,900 words – short story)

-Teeth pulled; canines etched with flowers; etchings darkened with shoe polish to achieve an effect like scrimshaw (full regrowth – 21 days)

Hold Us in the Light, Night and Day (Saga Books), July 2025 (6,180 words – short story)

The summer she’d turned twelve, the summer their mother left them, light had haunted her dreams. It had poured itself into the space behind her eyelids every night until she’d thrown the fucking carving she and Tristan had found in the quarry into the lake.

We Dwell in Its Many-Chambered Heart, Weird Fiction #11, Fall 2025 (3,630 words – short story)

Alanna digs at the scant gap of light surrounding the door. The improvised tool in her hand is flat and white and worn. She found it in her pocket when she woke. She’s fairly certain it used to be a bone.

Werewolf Girl Swallows the Moon, Howl: An Anthology of Werewolves from Women in Horror, November 2025 (4,420 words – short story)

She turned her phone so they could all see. Right there, in between endless make-up tutorials, dance trends, and the latest spicy food challenge, she’d found a video called How to Seduce Your Perfect Dark Lord. The Gothic Girls crowded around, breathless, and the Plan was born.

Most Like To…(Class of 1997), The Dark, December 2025 (5,850 words – short story)

I don’t know what I believe, looking back now, but I know what I believed then and what I picture when I remember that day. Natalie screaming. Her back arched. Her white gown turning red. Her feet lifting off the ground, the taut, painful bow of her body floating above the stage.

Us, In Another Universe, Lightspeed, December 2025 (1,440 words – short story)

In this universe, we fight because we can’t fuck. Call it Universe A, or One, the Golden Age where it all began.