Tarun Krishnamurthy author page

Hey everyone! This is my third puzzle for The New York Times, which I made in the first weeks of 2025 and which was accepted (to my surprise!) in late March.

But today I don't want to talk about this puzzle. Let me take you back to November 9, 2024 - the end of a full-day high school marching band competition, when I felt exhausted on the bus ride home. Midway through, I got a surprise email from someone named Joel Fagliano. I instantly recognized his name as one of the Games editors at The Times. My heart was already racing from the competition, but I opened the email nonetheless. It turned out he was asking me to write a crossword for a Times-branded puzzle book titled Puzzle Mania!. I couldn't contain my excitement. Just a year earlier, I could never have imagined having a puzzle in The Times newspaper, but now the editor himself was inviting me to contribute to a book - an opportunity I never expected in my lifetime.

Fast forward to October 21, 2025: the book has been released, complete with my byline! It's available in most bookstores across the country. I am eternally grateful to Joel Fagliano for giving me the chance and platform to write a puzzle (and I believe I am the youngest constructor in the book!!).

With that aside, my first few months as a freshman at San Diego State University have been truly wonderful. I've made many friends and joined several biomedical and cultural organizations. Being a psychology/neuroscience honors student on the pre-med track has opened up countless avenues on campus, but I'm still looking for more ways to make a tangible impact on my community. I am currently in the midst of a clinical volunteering/internship/research/shadowing search in the San Diego area, and I hope any would-be employers enjoy this puzzle!

I'd love for you to reach out to me at tarunlive@live.com or on Instagram at @thetarunkrish to collaborate on crosswords, discuss potential biomedical opportunities, chat about the state of the world, or just talk about anything else.

And, as always, thanks for solving!

P.S. I am working on another big project with the Games team- stay tuned in 2026 :)

This puzzle was made during the summer break right before my senior year, accepted on Halloween, and is now in publication just a few days after I graduated from high school. The timeline goes crazy for sure. I will be heading to San Diego State University in the fall as a neuroscience major in the Honors College, which I am so stoked for.

Back to the puzzle. The revealer is REESES PIECES, with entries having three groups, RE ES ES, found separately in them. However, even with this seemingly tight constraint, there were a great deal of entries that fit that criteria. And so, I decided to make the theme even more restrictive by not allowing plural endings as the majority of entries ended in ES to act like a plural, like TRES LECHES CAKES. This only resulted in the three entries you see in this grid. Looking back at it, I could have changed the grid layout and theme entry placement slightly to make the overall solve a bit easier, but I am glad that it still found a home here nonetheless. I am especially glad to miraculously include TEEN as the last Across entry in the puzzle and that the Games team kept the personal reference I included in its clue.

If you're interested in collaborating on a puzzle, feel free to reach out to me via Discord @quackerdeezles (yes, I made this name when I was in elementary school, lol) or email me at tarunlive@live.com.

Lastly, I would also like to mention the Crosscord Discord server. We've got a wonderful community of solvers and constructors alike, and they are the sole reason I have grown in crossword construction. Come say hi! And, as always, thanks for solving!

Hey, Crossworld! I'm a 16-year-old rising senior in high school based in Seattle, WA. I have been constructing for roughly a year, and I am thrilled to publish my New York Times debut and be on the list of teenage constructors! Besides constructing crosswords, you can find me playing percussion instruments and listening to dubstep music.

I first became fascinated with crosswords in late 2022 after stumbling upon a video of the final round of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Having always enjoyed puzzles like mazes and word searches since an early age, I found crosswords to be the perfect new challenge. After solving a few and perusing various crossword sites like XWord Info, I was surprised to find that many other constructors like Jeff Chen and Sarah Sinclair live here too, which gave me even more motivation to be a part of this growing crossword community in my hometown.

The motivation for this Times puzzle's theme arose from another puzzle published in 2023 that utilized a similar concept called grammagrams—words or phrases that can be phonetically expressed as a sequence of letters. I wanted to go further and then settled on C-N-M-N-E, or SEA ANEMONE. I assumed there would be a huge list of theme entries that I would have to slog through, but the theme was pretty tight, so it all worked out. And with 59 theme squares, the puzzle surprisingly filled cleanly, with two bonus down answers that I appreciate.

I am grateful to the editing team for keeping the fill the same and retaining most of the clues. I am especially glad for HOLI to be featured as I am an Indian-American. I hope I can include more references to my cultural background in my future puzzles.

I hope you enjoy the crossword!