Lee Mandelo

Lee Mandelo is an American author born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1990. Mandelo's debut novel, Summer Sons (2021), is a Southern Gothic campus novel about grief, obsession, and queerness, published by Tordotcom; reviewers highlighted its handling of gender identity and homophobia within horror conventions. Mandelo also edited the early genderqueer speculative-fiction anthology Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction (2012) and has contributed criticism and short fiction reprints to the online magazine Strange Horizons, alongside co-editing the nonfiction collection Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity (2025), a project addressing the future of queer and trans lives in speculative fiction.