Genre Grapevine Goodness: Finalist for Hugo and Ignyte Awards, Plague Birds Rerelease on June 30

There’s good and bad stuff going on in my life right now. Tomorrow I’ll release a report on some of the bad stuff I’ve been dealing with lately, but for now I want to focus on the goodness.

In very exciting news, I’m a finalist this year for both the Hugo and Ignyte Awards. For the Hugo Award, I’m a finalist for the sixth consecutive year in the Best Fan Writer category. For the Ignyte Award, my Genre Grapevine is a finalist for the Community Award for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre.

I’m honored to be a finalist for both awards. I believe I accomplished some of my most important work in 2025, in particular with essays such as “The Mask Comes Off When I Write,” which discusses my life and writing as someone on the autistic spectrum, and my booklet Tips and Strategies for Neurodiverse Writers. Hearing from fellow neurodiverse writers about how much these essays and explorations meant to them has been a bright spot in my life.

To see all of my eligible 2025 writings, go here.

Voting for the Hugo Awards is now open and closes on August 8. Voting for the Ignyte Awards is also currently open and closes on August 16.

In other good news, Apex Books will rerelease my novel Plague Birds on June 30. The novel, which was a finalist for both the Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, has been called “A stand-out work within the landscape of contemporary science fiction.”

The rereleased edition, titled Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition, is newly updated with an additional afterword and a standalone short story featuring Crista and Red Day titled “Little Fathers of Darkness.”

The book also features stunning new cover art by Marcela Bolívar, who created the cover art for the original release of Plague Birds.

Anyone who preorders the book directly from Apex receives a 30% discount.

As an added bonus, the sequel to Plague Birds will be released by Apex Book this coming January. Titled Plagues of Dissension, the sequel picks up the story of Crista and Red Day twenty years after the events in the novel.