The Washington (DC) Science Fiction Association (WSFA) has announced the finalists for the 2021 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction:

• “Foster-Child of Silence and Slow Time” by Brian Hugenbruch, My Battery Is Low And It Is Getting Dark, ed. by Crystal Sarakas and Joshua Palmatier, Zombies Need Brains LLC (July 2020)
• “Guest Athletes” by Jennifer R. Povey, The Phantom Games: Dimensions Unknown Vol. IIIed. by John Paul Catton, Excalibur Books (October 10, 2020) 
• “Heritage Hill” by Matthew R. Davis, Outback Horrors Down Under: An Anthology of Antipodean Terrors, ed. By Steve Dillon, Things in the Well, (October 2020)
• “The Longest Season in the Garden of the Tea Fish” by Jo Miles, Strange Horizons (April 2020) ed. by Gautam Bhatia, Rasha Abdulhadi, et al.
• “Memories Taste Best When Marinated With Sadness” by Feng Gooi, Hexagon Magazine, Issue 2 (Fall 2020) ed. by J.W. Stebner
• “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher, Uncanny Magazine, (September/October 2020) ed. by Lynn M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas 
• “Myself” by Rebecca Enzor, DreamForge, Issue 7 (December 2020) ed. by Scot Noel
• “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell, Diabolical Plots (June 15, 2020) ed. by David Steffen
• “Reformed” by Caias Ward, Mysterion, (March 23, 2020), ed. by Donald S. Crankshaw and Kristin Janz

The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction.  The award showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year (2020). An unusual feature of the selection process is that all voting is done with the identity of the author (and publisher) hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.

The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction

Association (www.wsfa.org) and will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held on October 1-3, 2021 at the Rockville Hilton, Rockville, MD.