The alumna's sophomore novel, drafted at Writers House, won the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction.

Ilana Masad finished the first full draft of Beings, published by Bloomsbury in September 2025 and winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction, during her return residency at the Writers House in 2024. The novel—which braids the story of 1960s alien-abduction witnesses Betty and Barney Hill with a queer science fiction writer’s letters and a present-day archivist’s obsession—took shape, Ilana says, partly through the residency’s own uncanny textures: David Searcy, her Corsicana neighbor and one of the residency’s founders, shared his own UFO lore and interest in the extraterrestrial and otherworldly, including a box of newspaper clippings and purported relics from the legendary Snippy the Horse. The isolation and quiet suited the book’s themes of solitude and belonging, and Corsicana’s scale mirrored the small, tight-knit worlds she was writing. Musing over the Searcy’s decades-old Airstream trailer outside her window evoked the same era as the novel’s earliest thread. “There's so much space out here in Texas,” Ilana says of the long walks that fed the writing. Beings has been named a most-anticipated title by the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, among others.