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How did your career in creating puzzles for NYTimes Games begin?
I grew up solving crosswords just like everyone else. I liked to do the NYT puzzle on my train commute to school. In 10th grade, I started to get interested in making crosswords and submitted a few to the Times. Will Shortz kindly rejected them (they were quite bad!), but sent along encouraging notes and I stuck with it. When I was a high school senior, I had my first puzzle published in the Times. I went on to intern with Will when I was in college, and eventually became his assistant.
Tell us about what inspired the Mini Crossword!
The year I started as Will’s assistant, I was fresh out of college. The New York Times had just launched its own Crosswords app – it was owned by a third party prior to 2014. They wanted something free, quick, and fun to include in the app since the Times crossword is famously quite hard. We brainstormed what a bite-sized crossword would look like, and Will recommended me to make it. In the beginning, I really didn’t think anyone was paying attention, so it was quite experimental. But I slowly found my audience and developed the tone, and the puzzle grew and grew.
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What’s your favorite part about your New York community?
I love the variety of my New York community – it includes college friends, sports-watching buddies, puzzle people, and all manner of others. In many ways, the Mini is like my personal diary, so my New York friends often have a leg-up in solving the Mini after they’ve hung out with me!
How do you decide what to include in each day's Mini Crossword?
I’m always on the lookout for “seed” answers – what we call the answer you build the puzzle around. Anytime a public figure makes news whose name is five letters or less (BILES, WALZ), I do a silent fist pump to myself. Otherwise, I keep a notebook of clue/answer pairings I’m hoping to use, whether that’s a stupid pun or an interesting trivia fact.
Do you have a favorite Mini Crossword you've created?
I’m fond of this puzzle I made for Earth Day in 2022, which used a picture overlay for the black squares of a redwood tree. This sort of graphic illustration weaved into the puzzle feels like the future of crosswords in the digital age.
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