On Saturday evening in Rockville, Maryland, the Washington Science Fiction Association did something quietly radical for a literary prize: it picked a winner without knowing who had written it. The 2026 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction goes to “Guardians of the Well” by Rose Strickman, published in In Another Time Issue 3: Illumination (June 2025), edited by Agatha Grimke, Naomi Tennakoon and Smriti Rao.
The award was announced on 3 October at Capclave, WSFA’s annual SF and fantasy convention, held this year at the Rockville Hilton & Executive Meeting Center. Capclave’s official motto is “Where Reading is not Extinct”, which has the defiant ring of a fanzine slogan from about 1974 and implies somebody, somewhere, is keeping a close eye on the asteroids.
The prize exists to salute the small press publishers who keep the lights on for short speculative fiction, and it covers original stories from the previous year. Its party trick is that WSFA members vote with the author’s name and the publisher’s masthead removed. No reputations, no follower counts, no faint afterglow from last year’s award ballots; just the words on the page. It is essentially a blind wine tasting for fiction, and in an age when half of publishing seems to run on platform metrics, there is something rather bracing about a jury that has no idea whether it is drinking a grand cru or something decanted in a shed. Seattle-based Strickman, whose byline has turned up in the likes of Luna Station Quarterly and the Sword and Sorceress anthologies, can therefore be confident the story did the winning all by itself.
The shortlist is a healthy cross-section of the small press scene. Liz Westbrook-Trenholm’s “Bag of Holding” appeared in On Spec (Vol 35, No 3, Issue #133, Copper Pig Writers’ Society, ed. Diane Walton), and its title will make anyone who has ever rolled a d20 reach instinctively for the inventory sheet. Vanessa Ricci-Thode’s “Billionaire’s Tears” ran in Escape Pod (24 July 2025, eds. Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes), describing a substance arguably rarer than unobtainium.
Zombies Need Brains managed to land two finalists from the same book, Skull X Bones (December 2025, eds. David B. Coe and Joshua Palmatier): R. M. Olson’s “Blackrock” and Stephen Harper’s “Half Life”. Given the blind voting, that is a double-tap with no room for accusations of favouritism, and a decent advert for the anthology.
Rounding out the field were Raven Jakubowski’s “The Last Mardi Gras” from DreamForge Anvil #20 (DreamForge Press, 1 June 2025, ed. Scot Noel); Andrew Dykstal’s “Not a Fish” from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #434 (12 June 2025, ed. Scott H. Andrews), a title as firm a denial as anything heard outside a parliamentary inquiry; and Rati Mehrotra’s “The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” from Uncanny Magazine Issue 67 (November/December 2025, ed. Michael Damian Thomas), which is surely the best job description in the entire shortlist.
Small press magazines have always been where the genre does its digging, from the duplicated fanzines of the Golden Age to today’s crowdfunded quarterlies run by volunteers on weekends. Fitting, then, that this year’s prize goes to a story about guardians of a well. The big reservoirs may get the headlines, but the rest of us know where the fresh water actually comes from.
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