Cover Reveal & ToC: We're Here 2025
We’re delighted to announce, along with editor Bogi Takács and series editor Charles Payseur, the full table of contents for We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2025:
“Magical Girl Antifa War Machine” by Esther Alter (Escape Pod)
“Toothpaste Feelings” by Sharang Biswas (khōréō)
“Whisper Network” by Polenth Blake (Everyday Aliens)
“In the Zone” by Lisa M. Bradley (Lightspeed)
“The Night Market” by Erin Brown (Skull & Laurel)
“A Dream of Twin Sunsets“ by Ryan Cole (Clarkesworld)
“Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny)
“When the Devil Comes from Babylon” by Maya Deane (Amplitudes)
“Ichthyosis” by M. L. Krishnan (Fantasy)
“Other Wars Elsewhere” by R. B. Lemberg (We Will Rise Again)
“his love's ashes on his tongue” by Monte Lin (Deadlands)
“How to Rob a Bullion Van” by Plangdi Neple (Baffling)
“Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” by B. Pladek (Lightspeed)
“The Girl that My Mother is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed (Reactor)
“Slipcraft” by Jarune Uwuyaren (Fiyah)
“A Nameless Thing” by P. C. Verrone (Fiyah)
“An Asexual Succubus” by John Wiswell (Of Shadows, Stars and Sabres)
Scroll down for submission information about We’re Here 2026.
The cover art of We’re Here 2025 is by the wonderful Ashanti Fortson, a first time Neon Hemlock collaborator. Check out more of Ashanti’s work. And here’s the full image (click for a lightbox view):
Submissions for We’re Here 2026 are now open. We’re Here 2026 will be helmed again by Charles Payseur and guest edited by Shingai Njeri Kagunda.
Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an award winning Afrosurrealist/Afrofuturist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown University. Shingai is the author of We Who Will Not Die (2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Novelette) and & This is How to Stay Alive (2022 Ignyte Award winner for best novella). They have been the co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine (Hugo Award finalist), co-editor of Podcastle Magazine (Ignyte Award winner), and co-founder of Voodoonauts—an Afrofuturist writing workshop for Black writers. With work featured in Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy, Year's Best African Speculative Fiction, Lightspeed, Africa Risen, and numerous literary journals, Kagunda’s speculative storytelling explores themes of social memory, resistance, and transformation.