The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop
Selected Awards & Announcements from Clarion Alums
Kelly Link (Clarion ‘95) sold new novel The Lover of Books, as well as an anthology of ghost stories and another title to Caitlin McKenna at Random House.
Grady Hendrix’s (Clarion ‘09) novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards in the Horror genre.
Senaa Ahmad’s (Clarion ‘18) debut short story collection, The Age of Calamities, was released January 2026 via Henry Holt and Co.
Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s (Clarion ‘22) novelette “We Who Will Not Die” (Psychopomp) won the 2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Novelette.
Andrew Dana Hudson’s (Clarion ‘22) debut novel Absence was released May 2026 with Soho Press.
“Clarion was a life-changing event not just because of what I learned about writing, but because it made me believe that I could be a writer.
Prior to attending Clarion, I’d been working in complete isolation. I didn’t know anyone else who was trying to write science fiction—I knew barely anyone who read science fiction. (…)
A lot of people say that going to Clarion is like meeting a family you didn’t know you had, and to me it definitely felt that way. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had read the books I had read and understood the things I was interested in and were trying to do the things I was trying to do. (…) Going to Clarion was how I found there was a community for writers out there that I could fit into.”
— Ted Chiang
“Clarion consistently trains and turns out the sharpest, most talented, most wildly original voices in our field. Where lesser programs exert a normative pressure that forces all the work coming out of them to a kind of even keel of sameness, the Clarion workshop manages the nearly impossible trick of bringing out writers' individual voices, turning out vividly dreaming graduates whose work turns the field on its ear every five years or so.”
— Cory Doctorow
Alum Spotlight: T.K. Rex
T. K. Rex (Ghost Class of 2020/21/22) has had short stories in over forty publications, including their debut collection, The Wildcraft Drones, on shelves May 21 from Stelliform Press.
The Wildcraft Drones follows the evolving relationship between nature, humanity and technology in fourteen stories linked by an AI-managed rewilding project, and the humans and other animals whose lives it changes, and who change it in return. Publishers weekly praised it as it “climate fiction with heart” and Kim Stanley Robinson described it as “a much-needed vision of how things could turn out well, despite the many dangers we are facing."
T. K.’s second book is a soon-to-be-announced sword and sorcery novella slated for 2027, and they’re currently querying an adult science fiction novel. Announcements, press, events, and art from The Wildcraft Drones can all be found at tkrex.wtf.
