While I spend a lot of my time talking about Fantasy, Dystopian stories are my absolute favorite.

I don't know what that says about me, but I love them so much. Give me well-told post-apocalyptic stories having conversations about the moral failings of our society and I promise, I will be eating out of the palm of your hand.

Parable of the Sower, Broken Earth, Hunger Games, Chain-Gang All-Stars. I will eat it up. Every single time!

So it was really no surprise to me when I fell in love with Buzzard.

Inez Ray sent this manuscript to me during a Pitchfest in 2025. It was one of a hundred or so manuscripts I received over a three day period. And I'll be honest: there were many truly exceptional stories in that bunch.

Like I do after every Pitchfest, I carved a few days out of my schedule to just chill in my house, reading through pitch letters and manuscripts and narrowing down which stories I thought would be a good fit for what I'm trying to accomplish here at Left Unread. And friends, a time was had. But here is what I need you to know: I knew Buzzard was the book from the first line of the pitch letter.

Buzzard is a near-future Dystopian sci-fi about the last midwife in the west who can perform abortions.

I still did my due diligence! I read through that hundred pitch letters. I narrowed the list down to ten or fifteen story ideas that really spoke to me and read through those manuscripts carefully. And many of them were truly phenomenal. I even chatted with a handful of the authors, encouraging them and talking about how exciting their work is. But when I read that line, I was sat.

I still remember waking up to the news that Roe v. Wade had been overturned. Conversations erupted all over the internet about how this decision would directly lead to the loss of lives. And within weeks, we began to watch exactly that happen. Conservatives began working overtime to roll back reproductive rights and women began to die.

That is why this line moved me immediately. Because I knew that any story that was tackling a conversation about the way our country is actively fighting to dismantle reproductive rights was a story I wanted to be a part of.

When I tell you that I immediately sat down and read that entire manuscript, I need you to know I am not exaggerating. I was feral for this story. I needed to know if the writing and the message blew me away as much as Inez's pitch. And y'all... they did. I was hooked throughout the entire manuscript. Taking notes, writing down ideas, plotting out a vision for the book and how to market it to my audience. I was obsessed. In fact, I was only a few hours into the manuscript when I reached out to our acquisitions director and let her know I needed to be a part of this project.

That is one of the things you can count on here at Left Unread: Every single project I get behind means something to me. They each hold a core message that I am desperate to shout from the rooftops. For me, a great story is not my only objective. I have to see the mission behind that great story. I want to leverage this opportunity to platform authors who are fighting to push the world toward something. And Buzzard absolutely fit that bill.

Buzzard follows Mae. She is a midwife in the near-future, fractured remains of the United States. She is also one of the last reproductive health care workers in the west who has been trained, and is willing, to perform abortions. A service she passionately provides the people of her community until she is caught and imprisoned for infanticide. Because of her medical training, she is forced to serve as a nurse for Obsityan's experimental private prison, where they are training teenagers to become drone pilots. Her hope is that she can just keep her head down, serve her sentence, and hopefully one day be reunited with her sons, who were ripped from her arms when she was arrested. However, that becomes more complicated when those teenagers start showing up in her exam rooms pregnant. Which should be impossible. Leaving Mae with a choice: Continue playing it safe and maybe build a future for herself... or do her part to resist the dangerous and oppressive systems that are actively choosing a future for everyone.

Buzzard tackled the deep and haunting themes that I love to read about, but through a very different lens than the first two books we published here. Cry, Voidbringer and Devil of the Deep are hard-hitting fantasies filled with magic, ancient gods and epic battles involving godchildren, mermaids, pirates and violent cults. Whereas Buzzard is set right here in the world we live in. In fact, it isn't even really re-imagining things. It tackles the world actively being built around us right at this moment. It deals with bureaucrats, billionaires and every day victims of the American dream.

I love fantasy. I love the way it lets us wrestle with real systems of oppression with just a touch of distance. It lets us watch our own suffering, and complicity, with an objective eye. I think there is incredible value in allowing us to look at the world from the outside. But I also see value in naming a thing. In looking at these same systems and openly calling them what they are. Stories that wrestle with systems of oppression by exposing every detail of their function and challenging readers to refuse to look away from the suffering happening around them.

That is what Buzzard does. It names the thing. From the very first page, it forces readers to look at the atrocities happening in the world around us and demands that we do not look away. It looks at systems and legislation that impacts our entire society and actively demonstrates how hopeless it feels to be their intended target. And perhaps most importantly, it demands that we take ownership in the fight to set us all free.

I cannot tell you how passionate I am about this project. Not just because it is a phenomenally written book--which it is. But because of the way it commanded my attention and forced me to see the world for what it is. Similarly to the way I was impacted by books like Parable of the Sower, Little Rot & Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Buzzard officially launches on September 22nd. But the work starts now.

It is important to me that this book reaches as wide an audience as possible. Its message needs to be heard and the work we do over the next five months will help decide how far it can go.

Here are a few actionable steps we can take, as a community, to position Buzzard for success:

1. Add Buzzard to your Goodreads TBR. Goodreads TBRs is one of the most effective ways for publishers to quantify interest in a book. Which helps us to prove to bookstores/retailers that they would not be taking a risk by stocking it. Whether you use Goodreads regularly (I do not), this is a quick and free way to help push this book toward success. If we want this book to be successful, partnership with bookstores is key. This is one way you can help make that easier. You can do that HERE.

2. Pre-Order your copy of Buzzard today. I know that buying a book you won't receive for five months isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world. But these pre-order campaigns play a huge part in helping us to break through industry barriers. This message needs to be heard. My hope is that a successful pre-order campaign can help us to boost its early success and position the book for a very wide reach. You can do that HERE.

3. If you are an e-book reader, request to read it early on Netgalley. In addition to TBR lists, it is very helpful to have people reading and talking about the book early. So I highly encourage anyone who is interested to go read it early and drop an honest review. You can request it HERE.

I do not have all of the details yet, but we will be doing a much more involved pre-order campaign this time. Which I am very excited about. So hold onto your confirmation email when you place your pre-order! Incentives will be dropping soon!

As always, I want to thank you all for being here and I want to invite you to be a part of what we are doing at Left Unread. If you are not already a subscriber, please consider subscribing today so that you can stay up to date on how to get involved in the fight for Black and brown authors. And if you have the means, consider subscribing at the $5, $12 or $25 tier in order to help fund our future projects. Thank you.