Samantha Allen brings her signature blend of wit, warmth, and cultural sharpness to Puck (Zando, June 2026), an A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired romcom about Puck, a nonbinary, thirty-year-old reality show producer whose talent for engineering other people’s chaos meets its match when their own friend group starts to unravel. Named a Most Anticipated Romance of 2026 by Marie Claire and USA Today, Puck has been praised as “a madcap speedrun that pushes the boundaries of the rom-com genre.”

Allen is also the author of the horror-comedy novel Patricia Wants to Cuddle (Zando, 2022), the Washington State Book Award finalist Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet (Zando, 2024), and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States (Little, Brown, 2019) — a travelogue the New York Times Book Review called “a powerful book of memoir and reportage.” She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and is a GLAAD Award-winning journalist with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and CNN.

Whether she’s writing horror, romance, or reportage, Allen has a singular gift for finding the tender, human core inside the absurd. Catch her live as she joins fellow authors for a panel on reality TV’s unexpected literary afterlife at the Salt Lake Book Festival.