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, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney's Stephen Dixon Award, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award for Short Fiction, 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.
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Her debut collection, Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine, is forthcoming October 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 a disgruntled drive-thru girl.
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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. ​​