Small press · United States
Jordan Kurella
A trans and disabled U.S. speculative-fiction author writing queer fantasy, dark speculative short fiction, and climate fiction.
Jordan Kurella is a trans and disabled U.S. speculative-fiction author. Their work includes queer fantasy, dark speculative short fiction, and climate fiction. Their catalog is compact — I Never Liked You Anyway, When I Was Lost, and The Death of Mountains — despite significant critical recognition.
Kurella publishes through niche independent presses: two books through Lethe Press, which specializes in strange, eerie, and queer fiction, and When I Was Lost through Trepidatio Publishing, an imprint of JournalStone. Their work has received major genre award nominations while remaining an emerging author with an independent-press catalog.
The standard questions
We ask every featured author the same set, so the archive is comparable.
- How did you start writing?
- I started writing short fiction as a way to process disability and identity when longer projects felt out of reach.
- Which publishing path did you take, and why?
- Small presses, deliberately — Lethe and Trepidatio understood the kind of queer, strange fiction I was writing when bigger houses didn’t know where to shelve it.
- What was the hardest lesson?
- That award nominations don’t pay rent. Sustaining a writing life took longer than getting any single book recognized.
- What does your working setup look like?
- I write in short, voice-to-text sessions that work with my disability rather than against it, rather than forcing long unbroken writing blocks.
- What marketing actually worked?
- Showing up consistently in the queer speculative fiction community did more than any single promotion — readers found the books through people they already trusted.
- What would you tell a first-timer?
- Find your community before you find your readers. The readers tend to follow.