This month’s contest puzzle is “Don’t Hate the Player” by Emma Oxford. The meta answer is a Shakespeare play.

If you’d like to see a wider variety of names in the bylines of these puzzles, please encourage your woman-identifying constructor friends to submit to this project! Or, if you yourself happen to be a woman-identifying constructor, please submit a puzzle! Or multiple puzzles! Instructions for doing so can be found in the Submit a Crossword link at the top right.

To submit to the contest, send an email with your answer in the subject line to damefoxwords@gmail.com. PLEASE NOTE: Starting this month, the contest deadline is moving up. The contest deadline is 11:59pm Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, September 5. The solution, as well as the name of the randomly chosen winner, will be published on Sunday, September 7. I’ve been considering shortening the submission window for a few months now so that the whole contest can be wrapped up in a week instead of ten days. This month I have some non-crossword-related things coming up that made it a good time to make the change.

AcrossLite (puz) file can be downloaded here.

PDF for download is below.

Happy solving! Please don’t get burned by the shortened submission window!!

Ex libris Ariadne