Anna Gundlach author page
1 puzzle by Anna Gundlach
with Constructor comments
See the 9 answer words debuted by Anna Gundlach.
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ANNA: I'm so excited for this puzzle to exist — this is my first NYT print puzzle, and working with Erik is a great experience. I've had puzzles previously in the LA Times, American Values Club, minis for the NYT app, the Indie 500 and Crosswords LA tournaments, and I'm also now the puzzle creator for Kinfolk magazine. I've been solving puzzles (or trying to) since I was something like ten years old, so this is a kind of huge deal for me.
Erik and I have created puzzles before, which is always wonderful. For this one, Erik provided some 15-letter entries to start a puzzle with. I picked the big central across one, put in 6-Down, and the whole northwest chunk just kinda miraculously fell into place. I'm not the best at making these wide-open themelesses, but I love solving them, so pulling this off felt real good. The smaller northeast/southwest portions were weirdly much harder to get into place. Our original cluing probably skewed a bit more Millennial/Gen Z, but it's nice to see that a lot of our clues stayed in place, or at least carried the same essence.