Neon Hemlock Press

Neon Hemlock Press is a small press based in Washington, DC. Press directories list it as founded in 2019, and dave ring is its publisher and managing editor. The press describes its output as speculative fiction, zines and queer chapbooks, and it adds some unusual company to the shelf: oracle decks, occult ephemera and literary candles. It takes tax-deductible donations through a fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, and distributes its novellas and anthologies to the book trade through Ingram via Itasca Books.

For a young press, the recognition has come quickly. Premee Mohamed's novella And What Can We Offer You Tonight, set in a far future of drowned coastlines, won the 2022 Nebula Award for best novella, and Book Riot reported it as the press's first Nebula. We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, edited by Charles Payseur and C. L. Clark, won the 2022 Ignyte and Locus awards in the anthology categories. Ring himself was a 2023 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Professional category for his work at the press, and The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread, an anthology he edited, was a finalist for the 2025 World Fantasy Award.

The list leans toward short forms: novellas, anthologies and story collections, most of them queer in subject or authorship and ranging across fantasy, science fiction and horror. Publishers Weekly once called the press "the apex of queer speculative fiction publishing", a line Neon Hemlock quotes on its own site.

On WebToTell, the book to start with is Call and Response: Stories of the Fantastic, Christopher Caldwell's debut collection, published on 14 October 2025. Caldwell lives in Glasgow, is a Clarion West alumnus and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, and has placed stories in Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons and FIYAH Literary Magazine. The collection is arranged so that characters appear in linked pairs across its two halves, and the author and library catalogue descriptions list it as a Crawford Award winner.

Readers coming from that book can expect more of the same ambition at modest length: single-sitting novellas and mixed-voice anthologies rather than doorstop series.