Puzzles I've Made

I've been making puzzles professionally - as in, for national print outlets - since 2020. This page lists all of those, as well as the puzzles I've made for other people's blogs, and for various subscription services. This page is a more-or-less complete list of them.

Whenever possible, I have linked to where you can do that crossword; this isn't always possible for some websites that don't really have a functional archive. A dollar sign ($) denotes paywalled content. A pencil ( Τ ) denotes and links to an external write-up of my puzzle from a crossword blog. A moon ( Λ ) denotes a puzzle I am particularly proud of.

For Mainstream Outlets

Most of the hundred-ish puzzles I've made for Slate are listed here; if you want a representative sample, I just adore and . Crossword Club, for which I write a weekly midi, doesn't have such a convenient archive, but this one from 2023 is a personal favorite.

For Books You Can Buy

Union Square and Co's "Decades" series of crossword books contains 4.5 puzzles by yours truly. New Grids on the Block (the '90s one) has three grids from me titled "Floppy Discs," "Catch Em If You Can," and "'90s Freestyle"; Grids Don't Lie contains a grid I wrote called "My Little Town" and a grid I co-wrote with frequent Quiara collaborator Brendan Emmett Quigley titled "Tire Tracks."

A puzzle I wrote titled "Total BS" appears in the print omnibus of puzzles from the Inkubator. (The beautiful themeless I wrote for them - see below - is not in that book, alas.)

N.b.: I assume that at least one of the mass-market New York Times crossword omnibi available for sale has a puzzle with a grid I constructed in it, but I was neither altered to that nor was I paid royalties. (Crossword union when!?)

For Indie Outlets

For Indie Bloggers

I wrote a ton of puzzles on my blog QVXwordz, which are all helpfully catalogued with Blogger's user-friendly tag system.

For Statistics Freaks

As discussed on the Salomon numbers article, my personal Salomon number is 2, due to the multiple puzzles I have made with Brendan Emmett Quigley (Salomon number 1). Everyone other than Brendan listed in parentheticals on this page thus has a Salomon number of 3, as do my QVXwordz collaborators: Kate Chin Park, Richard Allen, Riley Wise, and Ryan Fitzgerald. (I will let the reader decide whether my just one clue in "Just One Clue" counts as a collaboration for these purposes.)

Many commenters note the high "Scrabble value" of my name - QUIARA is worth 15 points in Scrabble tiles, and VASQUEZ 28, which calculates to a smidgen over 3.3 - and assume it's the most "Scrabulous" name among crossword constructors. A reasonable assumption, but a wrong one: I narrowly lose out to ZACHARY SPITZ, as 40/12 (3.333...) > 43/13 (3.307...).