Gwendolyn M. Hicks

Gwendolyn M. Hicks (they/them) writes emails by day and fiction about feelings by night. They are an alumna of the Clarion Workshop and the Lambda Literary Retreat. Currently, they are earning their M.F.A. in Fiction at San Francisco State University, where they are Co-Lead Fiction Editor for Fourteen Hills. They love green things, yearning, and making elaborate playlists.

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. 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 on the unceded territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone, now called 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 and were 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 Trollbreath, Heartlines Spec, Small Wonders, Hearth Stories, and others.They are also still on AO3, somewhere.They speak English, French, and Italian. They have been in Duolingo situationships with Irish, Czech, Greek, Welsh, Japanese, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, and Music.

Forthcoming

  • “A Cup to Carry Memory,” 7th-Circle Pyrite

  • “Six Views of a Speedster,” Uncanny

Long Fiction

Short Fiction

Poetry

2024 Awards Eligibility

The Heart That Beats Behind the Bones: Short story. Published in Hearth Stories, Issue 2. Deep in the forest, a mysterious priestess names and genders the village children (called eiken) by interpreting their dreams. One eik, whose bond with the priestess runs deep, begins to question everything as the years pass and she does not give eik a name.LP Kindred called this a “story of Queer Love, community expectation, social responsibility, FOMO, and individuation with lush prose and characters whose pulses ring like bells.” It was featured on Frivolous Comma’s Stories You Missed.How Islands are Named: Novelette. Published in June by The Lit Nerds. There is not an island in Lake McDermott, until there is: overnight, it appears fully formed in the water. Two sisters whose father has recently died find themselves called to name it, even as the world around them tries to render it ordinary.Change Your Mind: Poem. Published in Small Wonders, Issue 16. Great news: the multiverse comes in pill form now. Swallow it, and you can slip into another life for a while: maybe even one where the person who loved you didn't change their mind. An elegy for friend break-ups, SSRIs, and the obsessive longing to do things over.

2025

2022