2025 is a year of change at Candlemark & Gleam. After running the press since 2016, Athena Andreadis has decided to move to other commitments and endeavors. Melissa Scott, already a Candlemark author, offered to buy the press, and the sale is now complete. Scott intends to continue Candlemark’s commitment to publish innovative science fiction and fantasy that takes readers to unique and compelling new worlds—to present fiction that shapes the dark.

Candlemark & Gleam was founded by Kate Sullivan in 2010 and was purchased by Andreadis in November 2015. Since its inception, Candlemark has earned a reputation for publishing a wide range of speculative fiction that focuses on originality of imagination and quality of craft—nuanced, layered writing, a sense of myth, and stories that linger in the imagination. These qualities earned the press a slew of accolades and stellar reviews far exceeding its size.

Scott came to Candlemark as an author, first as a contributor to the extraordinary anthology The Other Half of the Sky, and then as the author of four novels, continuing a career that began in the 1980s and includes more than 40 novels as well as a handful of short stories. She is a four-time Lambda Literary Award winner in SF/F, a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the winner of several Spectrum Awards. In working with Andreadis, she fell in love with the press’s ideals, particularly Andreadis’s passion for the author’s vision, and she leaped at the chance to continue and build on that work.

Candlemark & Gleam expects to publish books by Martha Hood, Jo Graham, and Justin Robinson in 2025, and to open submissions for 2026.