BTL Issue 16!
Cover art (“House on Fire”) by Nora Kelly.
BTL Issue 16 is here!
Blood Tree Literature is fully back in the swing of our online publishing operations with our Winter 2025 issue. Featuring artwork by Nora Kelly and hybrid writing, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by…
Andrew Aulino, Sarah Parris, Johan PS, Jamie L. Smith, W.H. Hilf, Colin Kohlhaas, M. Palmer, M.C. Schmidt, Rukma Sen, József-Sándor Török, Sophie Amado, Catherine Hall Carson, Ellen Notbohm, Rae Rowe, Mia Arias Tsang, Maw Shein Win, Andrew Christoforakis, Amy Cygan, Jordan E. Franklin, Kimberly Gibson-Tran, ash good, Pete Hyberger, Melissa King, Angelina Leaños, Aaron Lelito, Sophie Sala, & Nicole Scott.
This issue comes with many “firsts” as well that I’m so proud are part of BTL’s growth & journey. Issue 16 is the first issue for our new team: Evan, Chelsea, Dianangelica, Sonia, Christa, William, Lily, Taylor, and Gabriela (and rae, while we had them <3). They all have done such gorgeous work and I’m so thankful for their help in putting together this fabulous collection of literary art. I can’t wait to share even more exciting stuff we’ve been working on together, as well as welcome even more team members in 2026.
Issue 16 is also our first issue cycle where we’ve implemented a “fee-free week” during our open submission period in order to improve our fiscal accessibility. We’ve also started making steps to improve our website’s UX accessibility, with a more mobile-friendly designs of our contributors’ published writings*. I still need to go through all our previous issues to catch them up on that improvement. Similarly, tagging past publications are still on the to-do list, but we’ve also started including Content Warnings on some of our more potentially triggering pieces.
This year is also our first in nominating our contributors’ work for literary prizes, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction anthology, Best Small Fictions, and the inaugural Genrepunk Awards. Peep our Instagram for our nomination announcements. I’m still working on a dedicated webpage to compile our yearly nominations, but I have gone live with another new webpage called Gratitude which showcases the organizations and individuals who’ve materially helped BTL’s growth behind the scenes.
We can’t wait to share all that 2026 has in store after New Years. There will be more Contributor Book Reviews, expanded publishing opportunities, and more. Stay tuned, and enjoy Issue 16!!!
XOXO
Kylie
*Reminder that BTL is still best viewed on a laptop or desktop screen in order to preserve the formatting of our contributors’ creative works.