Gwendolyn Maia Hicks (she/they) writes emails by day and fiction about feelings by night. They have a B.A. in French from St. Mary's College of California. Their youth was spent in Petaluma and Novato, California, and they now live in San Francisco. Gwendolyn attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 2022, and will be receiving her M.F.A. in fiction from San Francisco State University. She loves green things, yearning, and the Mountain Goats. She currently hosts the podcast Works Cited, available on Spotify.

Gwendolyn discovered writing at the age of six when they realized they really wanted Ash Ketchum and Misty to hold hands, and wrote their first Pokemon fanfiction in purple gel pen. They spent their high school days at Marin School of the Arts, studying Creative Writing under the late Sue Sommer. They majored in French with a minor in Creative Writing at St. Mary's College of California and studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence.

After college, Gwendolyn was an Editorial Intern at National Novel Writing Month in 2015. She worked for several years at Copperfield's Books in the Marin County area, and was an Assistant Editor on the first two issues of the National Magazine Award-winning Stranger's Guide magazine. After a brief stint in tech, she applied to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop in early 2020 and attended in 2022 with her cohort, the "ghost" class.

Gwendolyn loves to write about feelings, emotions, sentiments, and vibes. Their work tends to focus on themes of connection and the self, often set in fantastical worlds. Their work has appeared in Moss Puppy Magazine, and is forthcoming in 2024 in Crab Tales Magazine and Hearth Stories. They also still write and post plenty of shippy fanfiction, as their six-year-old self would have wanted.

Gwendolyn assists with the operations of a small contracts department at a not-for-profit education agency. She is on a personal journey to memorize every Mountain Goats song. She is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America and will see a free Palestine in her lifetime. Her biggest cheerleader was her father, Peter Hicks, who passed away in 2011.

Some of Gwendolyn's favorite writers who are also friends are Niv Sekar, Nica Bengzon, Lily Rosenthal, M. Mara Olivas, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, LP Kindred, Theodora Ward, Isabel Yap, Mary Thaler, Stefen Holtrey, Anna-Claire McGrath, Sam Lasman, T.K. Rex, Stef Tran, Lark Morgan Lu, Phoenix Alexander, Trae Hawkins, Victor Manibo, G.E. Woods, Sam Asher, Chelsea Sutton, Nic Anstett, V.G. Campen, E.G. Conde, Phong Quan, Ai Jiang, and many, many, many others. Please check out their work.