Aigner Loren Wilson is an Ignyte Award nominated writer for her speculative fiction and nonfiction writing and Hugo Award winning editor for her work as senior fiction editor for Strange Horizons from 2021 to 2025. Her work has been called, "profoundly disturbing and ethereal." She is from coastal New Jersey but currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Writing career Wilson began her professional speculative fiction writing career in 2018 with a published flash fiction in the literary speculative fiction podcast Nightlight: A Black Horror Podcast. After several subsequent poetry sales, Wilson made first professional SF prose sale in 2022 to Lightspeed (magazine), a magazine for which she went on to write monthly speculative fiction book reviews focusing on diverse books and authors. Other professional outlets in which her fiction has appeared include The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone (magazine), and FIYAH Literary Magazine. Her writing frequently incorporates humor even in works that are dark and serious in subject.
Wilson's speculative fiction editing career began in 2015 when she joined Strange Horizons and Nightlight: A Black Horror Podcast as a first reader and associate editor. She began her senior fiction editing in 2021 with guest editing positions for Apparition Literary Magazine and Fireside Fiction. Wilson served as senior fiction editor for Strange Horizons from 2021 to 2025. In 2024, she self-published a serialized novella, Twilight Children, through her newsletter, Writing Skins.
Along with her speculative fiction and poetry writing, Wilson publishes nonfiction in prominent outlets such as Wired (magazine), The Washington Post, and Reactor (magazine) (formerly TOR). She began writing nonfiction in 2019 for local publications in her area, Thurstontalk and Olyarts, covering topics related to arts, literature, and community events. From 2020 to 2022, Wilson wrote podcast reviews and interviews with podcasters for Discover Pods, including her monthly review roundup series Radio at the End of the World. Combining her work as a prolific editor and writer, Wilson began writing craft articles in 2021 for Writer's Digest, The Writer Magazine, and other publications. She also wrote for the Tor Nightfire blog doing reviews of horror short fiction and poetry in 2022.
Personal life Wilson enjoys hiking, books, games, and bread bakes. She lives with an unspecified number of partners and pets. She is a fan of vampires, but identifies more strongly with werewolves.
Selected Works
Fiction
It Came Gently (Lightspeed Magazine) Whatever Takes Us (Nightmare Magazine) Building Blocks (Interzone Magazine) You Who Does Not Exist (Baffling Magazine) To Carve Home in Your Bones (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
Poetry
Christine (The Five-2) Phantom (Arsenika) Demon at My Window (FIYAH) Come to Me (Anathema Spec from the Margins)
Books
Twilight Children (Substack) to be haunted (Haus of Three Crows) Plagued Company (Haus of Three Crows)
Games
The Nightmare House (Itch.Io) Take Me Home (Itch.Io)
Stories Edited
My Body by J. S. Jordan The Night the River Meets the Sky by Lina Rather Song of the Balsa Wood Bird by Katherine Quevedo Sheer in the Sun, They Pass by Hester J. Rook Seen Small Through Glass, by Premee Mohamed Oversharing, by R. J. Theodore A Message From Her Feline Self, Unborn, to Her Cousin, Whose Ancestors Were Once Wolves, by Jessica Cho We Are the Thing That Lives on the Moon, by Gillian Secord Give My Body to the Moths, by Riley Neither The Stars Above Eos, by M. Darusha Wehm Since He Came Back, by Lindsay King-Miller Mother Tongue, by Atreyee Gupta The Book of the Blacksmiths, by Martin Cahill Not a Basking Shark, by Hesper Leveret Fire and Ice by Anya Markov The Sing-along Killing and Silent Death of Malakine, the Horse Whisperer By Abhilash Jayachandra Undog by Eugenia Triantafyllou Death Comes for the Sworn Virgins by Avra Margariti Here All Week by Natasha King City Grown from Seed by Diana Dima Of Heirlooms and Teeth by Kaitlin Tremblay Sprouting God by Ezra Pilar Rodriguez Up in the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep in the Ground by Karlo Yeager Rodriguez Four Steps to Hunt a God by Athar Fikry Colors of the Sea by Katherine Nabity Of Flesh, Of Bone By Tania Chen Grey Hands, Green Sky by Charlie Valenti Speak No Evil by Edidiong Uzoma Essien Maladaptive Camouflage by Ann LeBlanc Time is an Ocean by Angela Liu A Cure for Solastalgia by E.M. Linden Frogskin by M. L. Krishnan Rembrandt, graffiti, and the strange disappearance of ducks by C.H. Irons Feeder Fish by Anne Mai Yee Jansen Cicadas, and Their Skins by Avra Margariti The Wilding Year by Jamie M. Boyd The Problem With Feelin’ Flo-Jo’s Glory Pose by Aurelius Raines II Whale Fall by J.L. Akagi Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackened Husk of a Planet by Adeline Wong The Lord of Mice’s Arrows by Nadia Radovich Exit Interview by K.W. Onley Bullet Time at the Kink Party by miriam View Window by A. T. Greenblatt How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross by Octavia Cade Everything We Lost in the Apocalypse by Mar Vincent Pandora's Formula by Hannah Yang The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon by Jennifer Hudak The Luring Lantern by Laura Cranehill
Nonfiction & Reviews
The Perfect Escape: What goes into designing cozy life sim games (The Washington Post) Finding Your Character’s Voice (Writer’s Digest) How I Punched Up My Fiction to Get Out of the Slush Pile (Writer’s Digest) Double Duty: Showing Character Development Through Dialogue (Writer's Digest) Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
Awards YearTitleAwardCategoryResult2019n/aOtherwise Award (formerly Tiptree Award)Honors list2023n/aIgnyte AwardCritics AwardFinalist"To Carve Home in Your Bones"Ignyte AwardOutstanding NoveletteFinalist2024n/aIgnyte AwardCritics AwardFinalistSenior Fiction EditorHugo AwardBest SemiprozineWinner
References
External links