Gwendolyn Maia Hicks

Gwendolyn discovered writing at the age of six when they realized they really wanted Ash Ketchum and Misty to kiss and wrote their first Pokémon fanfiction in purple gel pen. As a teen that owned one of those "come to the dark side we have cookies" t-shirts from Hot Topic, they attended Marin School of the Arts at Novato High School, studying Creative Writing for four years with the late Sue Sommer. They went on to major in French with a minor in Creative Writing at St. Mary's College of California and studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence. They are currently pursuing their Master of Fine Arts degree in Fiction at San Francisco State University, and are Co-Lead Fiction Editor for Fourteen Hills. They live in San Francisco with their incredibly smart husband and their two less smart cats.Gwendolyn was an Editorial Intern at National Novel Writing Month in 2015. They worked for several years at Copperfield's Books in Marin County, and were an Assistant Editor on the first two issues of the National Magazine Award-winning Stranger's Guide magazine. They were admitted to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop in early 2020 and attended in 2022 with their cohort, the "ghost" class. In 2025, they attended the Futurescapes Summer Intensive in Florence, Italy; they will also be a Speculative Fiction Fellow at the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.Gwendolyn loves to write about feelings, emotions, sentiments, and vibes. Their work tends to focus on themes of connection and the self and also the joyful agony of falling in love, often set in fantastical worlds. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Small Wonders, Hearth Stories, and others.They are also still on AO3, somewhere.They speak English, French, and Italian. They are in Duolingo situationships with Irish, Czech, Greek, Welsh, Japanese, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, and Music.

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