Joel Hans is a fiction author, editor, and developer relations lead in Tucson, Arizona.

His debut short story collection, The Bedtime Emptying of Our World, won the 2024 Moon City Short Fiction award and will be published in late 2025 with Moon City Press.

The twenty-two stories borrow from speculative fiction and fairy tales in equal measure, and set them against the vivid backdrop of the Sonoran Desert. From impossible quests to helpers to tiny lacks, new threads emerge: How can we reconcile with this impossible task of parenthood in all its permutations? When will the fairy-tale helpers come to rescue us? Can we find our way back from the edge of the void that has taken all the things we love most? Would we even like to try?

Read more about the collection →

His fiction has been published in Fairy Tale Review, Story, West Branch, Booth: A Journal, Passages North, HAD, and many others, and has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona, and now edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe.

He works as a Developer Relations Lead at ngrok, running a team focused on using content, code, and community to make networking and production software infrastructure a little less painful.