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Hello, readers and listeners, lovely visitors to the castle!

We have some bittersweet news to announce. After an enjoyable tenure, Jen Albert and Cherae Clark are leaving their positions as co-editors of PodCastle. There are, simply put, not enough hours in the day, and they both need to focus on their rapidly expanding careers. Jen will be pursuing book editing and acquisitions at ECW Press, while Cherae focuses on writing (including the sequel to The Unbroken).

They are thrilled, however, to leave the keys to the castle in the capable hands of Eleanor R. Wood and Shingai Njeri Kagunda. We’ll let them introduce themselves to you at length a little later on, but briefly:

Eleanor has been working with PodCastle as an associate editor and copyeditor at PodCastle for over four years and is an excellent writer as well. Her stories have appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, Diabolical Plots, PodCastle, Nature: Futures, The Best of British Fantasy 2019, and various anthologies, among other places.

Shingai is a Kenyan writer of flash, short fiction, novel, and poetry who’s finishing her MFA at Brown University. During the pandemic, she co-founded Voodoonauts, a empowerment and educational organization constructed to uplift Afrofuturist Writers. Her story in Fantasy Magazine, “And This Is How to Stay Alive,” will reprint in 3 best-of anthologies this fall as well as sprawl into the novella, & This Is How to Stay Alive, at Neon Hemlock.

 

The upcoming stories through the rest of the year will likely be some combination of stories that Jen and Cherae picked out from the submissions periods of 2020, and the stories that Eleanor and Shingai pick out from this year. And in the future, who knows? Jen and Cherae may show up for a narration or to guest host an episode or two.

So, in all honesty, this is probably not the last time that you’ll hear from either Jen or Cherae–once you’re part of the Escape Artists family, you’re kinda stuck. With that, please give a warm welcome to Eleanor and Shingai! We all look forward to how their vision shapes the future of PodCastle.

From Jen and Cherae–thank you all for being a part of our lives for the last several (Jen)/few (Cherae) years. We’ve loved reading your stories and your reactions to the stories we aired. Thank you also for the confidence you’ve placed in us as you nominated and voted for us in the Hugos, the Ignytes, the British Fantasy Award, and more.