Acrostic for Sunday, April 9, 2023

CONSTRUCTOR NOTES:

Hi, I'm Mark Halpin, a theater set designer and professor whose puzzles have appeared in the New York Times, NPR's Ask Me Another, Will Shortz's Wordplay, The Sondheim Review, Puzzles for Democracy, Queer Qrosswords, and Cryptic All-Stars. A fan of multi-puzzle extravaganzas, I've contributed dozens of puzzles and metapuzzles to four iterations of the MIT Mystery Hunt, and my own Labor Day mini-hunts for about fifteen years, proceeds from which support The Trevor Project. I've created puzzling illustrations for Eric Berlin's third Winston Breen book, The Puzzler's Mansion, and you can find a bunch of my puzzles at Some Puzzles by Mark Halpin.

I hope you enjoy my Acrostic. I thought it would be appropriate to do something about words and their nuances, and something about "hope" also felt like it might resonate with folks right now. I highly recommend the source material for the quote, a short-short story by one of my favorite authors.