Issue Sixteen, July 2024

I once read that people facing parole hearings have a much better chance of release if their hearing is early in the morning. This is because, by the afternoon, the parole board has decision fatigue—the parts of their brains responsible for hearing testimony and weighing evidence are literally exhausted, and so they just start saying no to everyone. This is, in fact, a terrible reality that incarcerated people face in this country, and it's only one of the very many aspects of the carceral system that has to fundamentally change.

Issue Fifteen, May 2024

These poems and fictions, like my life at the moment, are about change. Resisting it. Surrendering to it. Massaging it and its outcomes.

One is about getting revenge for other versions of you because you couldn't get revenge for yourself. One is about the specter of grief and the art of letting go. One is about listening to the world we found amid the buzz of the world we've made. One is about becoming an alien and falling in/out/in love. One is about the powers of love, admiration, and becoming. One is about being taken and choosing to stay. One is about the travaux a woman survives and who she's meant to be afterward. One is a force of nature and/or a woman scorned. One is sci-fi synesthesia. One is about the journey, what you lose to embark and what you find along the way.

Issue Fourteen, March 2024

Spring has come to the Northern Hemisphere, and that means the birds are singing, the plants are blooming, and there's more great fiction and poetry to read! Spring is a time of renewal, a time of opening back up after the claustrophobia of winter, but it's not all sunshine and puppy dogs. A spectre is haunting us, like Marx and Engels said, but instead of communism, it's the deep and abiding dread of the climate crisis knocking on our doors. The March issue therefore is a special one, what we call our DRY ISSUE, and it's full of stories and poems meant to evoke a vision of a changing planet, a clarion call of catastrophe and hope. Here are the sins of our past and the bright songs of a painful and glorious future.

Issue Thirteen, January 2024

Haven Spec Magazine is now a pro-paying market! We're grateful to everyone who supported our Kickstarter, and we are so glad to be able to give our wonderful authors the rates that they deserve. We have big plans for 2024, including interviews with some amazing editors, stories from across the width and breadth of the human experience, and short fiction reviews from your very own Haven Spec staff (okay, mostly Danai). I very much want Haven Spec to be a part of the wider SFF community, and that means paying people what they deserve, shouting out the stories and magazines we love, and publishing as much awesome fiction and poetry as we possibly can.

Issue Twelve, December 2023

Issue Twelve is here!

We've got:

Fiction by Monte Lin, Richard Ford Burley, Elisabeth Kauffman, Karen Aria Lin, Elizabeth Broadbent, and Karl Dandenell!

Poetry by Wen Yu Yang, Shana Ross, H.V. Patterson, Goran Lowie, Anna Madden, Archita Mittra, Brian Hugenbruch, G.E. Woods, Elis Montgomery, Maria Schrater, and Elizabeth R McClellan!

Read the entire issue now!

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