Level Best Books co-owners Shawn Reilly Simmons and Verena Rose announce the recent addition of Michael Bracken as a consulting editor for the Level Short imprint. He will edit or co-edit two anthologies for the imprint in 2024 and four anthologies each year beginning in 2025.
Founded in 2003, Level Best Books publishes award-winning anthologies, novels, middle-grade and YA fiction, cookbooks, and true crime through a variety of imprints. Short stories published by Level Best Books have won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Derringer, and Robert L. Fish Award for Best First Short Story and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories.
An Anthony-nominated anthologist, Bracken’s first two Level Short projects, scheduled for release in 2024, are Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology, co-edited with Barb Goffman, and Wish Upon a Crime, co-edited with Stacy Woodson.
Bracken has edited or co-edited 28 published or forthcoming anthologies, and he serves as the editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and as an associate editor of Black Cat Weekly. Stories from Bracken’s projects have won or been short-listed for the Anthony, Derringer, Edgar, Macavity, Shamus, and Thriller awards and have been selected for inclusion in and/or made the extended list of best stories of the year in The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories.
Also a writer, Bracken is the Edgar- and Shamus-nominated, Derringer-winning author of approximately 1,200 short stories, including crime fiction published in The Best American Mystery Stories and The Year’s Best Mystery Stories.
“Michael brings a long history of editing and writing short mystery fiction, and his love for the form is evident in all that he does,” Simmons said. “We look forward to his creative input as we expand the Level Short imprint into the premier publisher of crime fiction anthologies.”
Woodson, a multi-award-winning short story writer who received The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Award for her first published story, is co-editing one of Bracken’s first two anthologies for Level Short and will co-edit additional anthologies going forward.
Learn more about Level Best Books.
Learn more about Michael Bracken.
Learn more about Stacy Woodson.
