Founded in 2024, Violet Lichen Books is the sister imprint of Apex Book Company. Violent Lichen was created by Marissa van Uden to give a home to those dark, literary, weird books that might be a little outside of the norm. The imprint focuses on speculative ecofiction, Weird and New Weird, and moody science fiction with uniquely memorable characters.
Violet Lichen is the publisher of ECO: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, the first ever annual “best of” anthology for ecofiction. It showcases some of the finest stories published in this genre across hundreds of magazines, journals, and collections every year.
Meet the Violet Lichen team below…
Submissions
Novella query windows and ECO anthology nominations will be announced across our social media and via the Apex newsletter.
Marissa van Uden grew up in New Zealand and now lives in Vermont, in a little cabin in the woods. She loves wild things, night hikes, and eerie forests. Her anthology credits include Strange Libations, Strange Machines, Strange Locations, and The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird. Her short stories have appeared in Vastarian Literary Journal, Dark Matter Magazine, Zero Dark Thirty, and Los Suelos. She can sometimes be found at @marissavu.bsky.social and Instagram @marissa.vu.
Nichole Lightner is a weird writer and editor, living in the edges of Appalachia. She’s teasing out dark hymns from broken records when everyone in the house finally goes to sleep. She would love to talk to you about your niche hyperfocus, especially if it’s about abandoned places, ARGs or lost media. She would love to see pictures of your pets. You can find more of her work in Maudlin House, 34 Orchard, Twin Pies Literary, Thirteen Podcast, and Inner Worlds. You can find her at Instagram (@nicholeon) or @nicholeon.bsky.social.
R.L. Summerling (she/her) is a part-time fiction writer and full-time squirrel watcher from Southeast London. She has fiction in the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Volume 5, Interzone, Maudlin House, and Seize the Press. You can find her at www.rlsummerling.com.
Guan Un is an Australian-Chinese writer of speculative fiction based in Sydney. His work has been featured in LeVar Burton Reads, Year’s Best Fantasy Vol 2, Strange Horizons and more. He works as a freelance editor and has now read so much ecofic, his eyeballs are growing slightly mossy. You can find him at @thisisguan.bsky.social or guanun.com.
Alana Perrin is originally from Los Angeles but now drifts from city to city across the US, somewhat like a haint. You can find her hiking with her dog or reading with her cat. She is a slush reader for Apex Magazine.
Colton Kekoa Neves is a gay, Native Hawaiian author who once believed his toy chest could fly him to new worlds and has been chasing that high ever since. By day he’s been a startup entrepreneur, tour guide, bank teller, caregiver, and game designer. By night he’s probably playing too much Magic the Gathering. In between, he writes. Colton is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, class of 2024. He braves the winters in Cambridge, MA with his husband and their monstress-turned-kitty Amelia. Say aloha on Twitter @coltontheshaper.
Sasha Brown is a Stoker-nominated author whose work has been called “Creative! But in a bad way.” He’s in lit mags like Passages North and Split Lip, and in genre pubs like Bourbon Penn and Pseudopod. He knows three cool facts about frogs. He’s sashabrown on bsky and sashabrownwriter.com online.
Ende Mac (any pronouns) is a public defense attorney and slipstream author somewhere out in the Great Plains. You can find them at endewriting.wordpress.com/ or at their stuffed possum’s Instagram page, @ronanthepossum.
Our Goal
Our goal is to work closely with authors in an ethical and caring way, and to get more brilliant, weird fiction into more readers’ hands. Lichen is not only beautiful but it stands for mutually beneficial symbiosis, which is the kind of publishing and community we want to be a part of.
Violet Lichen Books
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