Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell is a queer Black American writer who lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. He is an alumnus of Clarion West and received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. His short fiction has run in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex and Fiyah, and in anthologies including New Suns 2 and Trouble the Waters.

His fantasy centres on Black, mostly queer protagonists, and it keeps running into slavery, war, gender and what it means to be a person. The voice changes from story to story, and some tales share a world. Uncanny readers will know the thread that links "Femme and Sundance", "Miz Boudreaux's Last Ride" and "Be My Horse, Ride the Cowboy".

Call and Response: Stories of the Fantastic is his debut collection, published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2025. It gathers earlier magazine stories and adds one new piece, "The Lonesome Sea". The book is built as a pair of halves. Characters introduced in the first half come back in the second, seen differently. It won the Crawford Award, which honours an outstanding first fantasy book, and the judges praised its mix of queer joy and rage in lyrical prose. It was also a 2026 Ignyte Awards finalist, and Neon Hemlock lists further shortlist and finalist places for the Le Guin Prize and the British Fantasy Award.

Start with Call and Response, since it is the book on WebToTell and, so far, his only collection. Read it in order. The second half works as an answer to the first, and you lose that if you skip around.