Mallory Montgomery author page
1 puzzle by Mallory Montgomery
with Constructor comments
See the 5 answer words debuted by Mallory Montgomery.
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Mallory: I couldn't ask for a better NYT debut than this one, shared with Zhou. We've worked through dozens of absolutely inane unworkable ideas, and a few that have, through countless revisions, become publishable in reputable outlets. Not a bad success rate, when you have as much fun on the inane ones as we do. We came up with this idea in early 2024. Our first version, a Schrödinger puzzle, was submitted (and rejected) in July 2024. Fortunately for me, Zhou is persistent and clever, and we didn't give up. We resubmitted in April 2025 and, after some revisions, it was accepted in July and ran the following January.
The best thing to come from this, of course, is my friendship with Zhou. We have so much fun constructing and solving together, I couldn't ask for a better collaborator and friend.
Zhou: I'm overjoyed to be sharing this byline with Mal, a rockstar woman and amazing human. Women are underrepresented in crossword construction, and all-women collabs are particularly uncommon, so I'm delighted to add one tick for "all-women collabs" to the 2026 numbers. Hopefully, there will be many more of those ticks to come (and at least a few more by the two of us)! I'd also like to shout out Kate Chin Park, who was crucial in helping us refine this idea and get it to publication-worthy status. Thank you so much, Kate!! We couldn't have done it without you.
As for the puzzle itself — we spent a long time on several different versions of it, in an era when we were just "baby constructors", as Mal likes to say. (We're probably in our awkward teenage phase by now.) We have so many screenshots of previous grids, and it was fun to go back and see how far we've come since those early days. I'm super happy with how this puzzle turned out, and I'm particularly pleased to debut KOTEX (that corner was all Mal!), which we originally clued as [Brand that's only periodically relevant?] I thought that was hilarious, but unfortunately it didn't make the cut... Next time!