Kristina Ten has written about lovers experiencing erosion, demigods attending desert music festivals, spirits lurking in the backs of bathhouses, and seals granting wishes at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Her stories appear in McSweeney's, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and elsewhere. She has won the Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus Award, and the WSFA Small Press Award. She works from queer, feminist, and diasporic perspectives.
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Her debut collection, Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine, came out October 7, 2025 from Stillhouse Press.
Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the MFA program in fiction at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also taught creative writing, and has been awarded fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. As a copywriter, she has written about chaise lounges, ultralight backpacking tents, K-beauty, and what wine tannins even are anyway. She's been a shelter dog walker, a lit journal editor, a volleyball line judge, a professional necklace untangler at a mall jewelry chain, and the disgruntled drive-thru girl pouring your Frosty.
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Born in Moscow, she has lived most of her life in the U.S., in the company of mischievous pups, melodramatic plants, and bookshelves full of fairy tales. ​​