Snap Judgement is a quarterly live stream featuring three professional editors who offer feedback on the first page (up to 250 words) on unpublished genre short stories submitted by Apex Magazine subscribers and Patreon backers.
This Snap Judgement event was held on August 2nd, 2022. Our host and narrator for the event was Alyson Grauer and our special guest panelist was Sheree Renée Thomas, the editor-in-chief of F&SF!
how it works
Our host reads the submissions aloud to the panel. The excerpts are presented without any identifying information to the panelists and viewers. If at any point our panelists feel they would stop reading and reject the piece, they raise their hand. If all three hands are raised, our narrator stops reading.
Each panelist then gives feedback on the 250-word opening: what works, what doesn’t, and what could be done to improve it. Don’t expect our panelists to be a mean group, but do expect them to be honest and truthful when it comes to assessing the work.
participant bios
Host & Narrator – Alyson Grauer
Alyson Grauer is an author, actor, and podcaster based out of Chicago. Her first novel, On the Isle of Sound and Wonder, is a steampunk Shakespeare retelling. Her short fiction has appeared in Apparition Lit, Cast of Wonders, and several indie anthologies. Her audio production work can be heard on such podcasts as Skyjacks: Courier’s Call, The Write Mindset, Warda, and the One Shot Podcast Secret Archive. She’s also known for performing at renaissance faires and world-class theme parks. Find her at dreamstobecome.com or on Twitter & Instagram @dreamstobecome.
Special Guest – Sheree Renée Thomas
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 2020) is her first all prose collection. She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press July 2016), long-listed for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct January 2011). She edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction anthologies, Dark Matter (2000 and 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction short stories. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage, 2020). She is the Associate Editor of the historic Black arts literary journal Obsidian: Literature & the Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 and is the editor-in-chief of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also writes book reviews for Asimov’s. She was recently honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Special Award – Professional category for contributions to the genre and was the co-Host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony at Discon III in Washington, DC with Malka Older. Sheree was the Guest of Honor of Wiscon 45 and a Special Guest of Boskone 58. She is a Marvel writer and contributor to the groundbreaking anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.
Lesley Conner & Jason Sizemore
Jason Sizemore is the publisher of Apex Book Company and Apex Magazine. He is a former editor-in-chief of Apex Magazine and currently functions as the editor-in-chief of Apex Book Company.
Lesley Conner is the editor-in-chief of the award-winning genre short fiction publication Apex Magazine.
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