Augur. She has recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia, and will be looking for a home for her debut experimental novel. She can be found sprinting from spiders and drinking bubble tea @vivianlicreates on <a href=https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/vivian-xiao-wen-li/"https://www.instagram.com/vivianlicreates/">Instagram, <a href=https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/vivian-xiao-wen-li/"https://bsky.app/profile/vivianlicreates.bsky.social">Bluesky, and <a href=https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/author/vivian-xiao-wen-li/"https://mastodon.social/@vivianlicreates">Mastodon." />
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Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li is a queer and neurodivergent 1.5-generation Chinese-Canadian immigrant writer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. Her fiction/poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Uncanny, F&SF, Heartlines Spec, The Massachusetts Review, The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, QWERTY, and The Fiddlehead, among others. The author of Someday I Promise, I'll Love You (845 Press) and a Banff Centre alumnus in poetry, she is the writer and director of three short films—including an award-winning video poem—that have premiered internationally in festivals. She was Longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize, Shortlisted for the Vancouver City Poems Contest, a Finalist for The Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, a 2024 ScreenCraft TV Pilot Script Competition Semifinalist, and the winner in the short story category of the CWC Sustaining Shared Futures Writing Award. She was nominated by Heartlines Spec for Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Two, and was most recently an editor for Augur. She has recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia, and will be looking for a home for her debut experimental novel. She can be found sprinting from spiders and drinking bubble tea @vivianlicreates on Instagram, Bluesky, and Mastodon.


Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity 
As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
Friday: When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor by Veronica Roth 
Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
Issue 2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons
Issue 23 Feb 2026
Issue 16 Feb 2026
Issue 9 Feb 2026
Issue 2 Feb 2026
By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 26 Jan 2026
Issue 19 Jan 2026
Issue 12 Jan 2026
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