Mallory Montgomery author page
2 puzzles by Mallory Montgomery
with Constructor comments
See the 10 answer words debuted by Mallory Montgomery.
| I | T | E | M | N | I | L | E | L | L | A | M | A | ||
| T | A | X | I | O | V | A | L | A | O | D | A | I | ||
| S | T | A | N | M | O | N | K | N | O | D | E | S | ||
| B | A | C | K | W | A | R | D | S | C | A | P | |||
| A | M | T | R | A | Y | L | I | S | B | O | A | |||
| D | I | A | D | E | M | P | S | I | A | R | M | |||
| M | A | A | C | U | T | O | F | F | T | E | E | |||
| S | K | U | L | K | O | R | E | E | L | T | O | N | ||
| M | I | N | I | S | K | I | R | T | M | A | L | |||
| O | L | D | E | L | S | T | U | X | E | D | O | |||
| G | O | O | I | E | R | F | I | R | S | I | B | |||
| S | T | R | I | P | E | D | S | O | C | K | S | |||
| S | W | I | S | H | F | U | R | Y | B | A | D | E | ||
| P | I | Q | U | E | F | R | A | U | I | R | I | S | ||
| A | N | S | E | L | Y | E | L | P | T | S | K | S |
Mallory: Zhou and I are back with more silly antics, this time in sartorial form. If we get enough requests, maybe we'll take a photo of ourselves in the outfit described by this puzzle's themers…
Zhou: Our first original themers for this puzzle had clues that involved different fonts and special images. We were rejected, of course. In our next version of this puzzle, we made sure to make all the clues Unicode friendly and not require any special images or fonts. This version was what I call "soft rejected" — the editing team asked us to replace two of our themers, including my favorite one (NO SHOW SOCKS, with an empty clue). I despaired at finding two [adjective] + [piece of attire] themers that could be a) clued in a clever way with the piece of attire being a verb, b) symmetric with the themers that were already approved and c) would maintain the right order of the outfit from head to toe. Luckily, Mallory was undeterred, and so here we are! Also — shoutout to the friendly crossword Discord for helping us brainstorm entries for this theme — thanks so much to all of you for your engagement and ideas!
| B | E | L | A | B | C | S | A | R | B | U | S | ||
| A | M | A | D | R | I | P | Y | O | I | N | K | ||
| H | I | G | H | D | I | V | E | P | O | N | Z | I | |
| T | R | U | E | T | I | A | N | A | G | I | N | ||
| N | A | E | C | R | O | P | T | O | P | S | |||
| T | H | I | R | D | S | V | I | E | |||||
| O | A | T | G | E | N | I | E | A | F | R | O | ||
| G | R | A | D | E | I | N | F | L | A | T | I | O | N |
| A | P | S | E | Z | E | S | T | Y | F | S | U | ||
| A | X | E | Y | E | N | T | A | S | |||||
| O | V | E | R | B | O | O | K | S | A | Y | |||
| A | I | L | O | N | S | E | T | S | C | O | T | ||
| K | O | T | E | X | A | L | I | S | T | E | R | S | |
| E | L | O | T | E | G | L | E | E | N | C | O | ||
| N | A | N | A | S | E | Y | R | E | T | A | S |
Mallory: I couldn't ask for a better NYT debut than this one, shared with Zhou. We've worked through dozens of absolutely inane unworkable ideas, and a few that have, through countless revisions, become publishable in reputable outlets. Not a bad success rate, when you have as much fun on the inane ones as we do. We came up with this idea in early 2024. Our first version, a Schrödinger puzzle, was submitted (and rejected) in July 2024. Fortunately for me, Zhou is persistent and clever, and we didn't give up. We resubmitted in April 2025 and, after some revisions, it was accepted in July and ran the following January.
The best thing to come from this, of course, is my friendship with Zhou. We have so much fun constructing and solving together, I couldn't ask for a better collaborator and friend.
Zhou: I'm overjoyed to be sharing this byline with Mal, a rockstar woman and amazing human. Women are underrepresented in crossword construction, and all-women collabs are particularly uncommon, so I'm delighted to add one tick for "all-women collabs" to the 2026 numbers. Hopefully, there will be many more of those ticks to come (and at least a few more by the two of us)! I'd also like to shout out Kate Chin Park, who was crucial in helping us refine this idea and get it to publication-worthy status. Thank you so much, Kate!! We couldn't have done it without you.
As for the puzzle itself — we spent a long time on several different versions of it, in an era when we were just "baby constructors", as Mal likes to say. (We're probably in our awkward teenage phase by now.) We have so many screenshots of previous grids, and it was fun to go back and see how far we've come since those early days. I'm super happy with how this puzzle turned out, and I'm particularly pleased to debut KOTEX (that corner was all Mal!), which we originally clued as [Brand that's only periodically relevant?] I thought that was hilarious, but unfortunately it didn't make the cut... Next time!