Briana Kuni

Briana Kuni writes speculative fiction about young women discovering powers that are inseparable from family history and emotional responsibility. If Feelings Could Kill, published in 2023, follows Bernice, known as Bernie, who has spent her life moving from place to place with her mother and avoiding lasting attachments. When her mother disappears, Bernie travels toward the Pacific island of her birth and learns that her emotions can alter physical reality. The search also brings her into conflict with a king who has spent years looking for his missing daughter. Kuni builds the novel around a literal connection between feeling and landscape: an outburst can create beauty or cause widespread destruction. Her other fiction includes Heir of Alhara, further linking her work with young women, inheritance, and hidden realms. Rather than presenting power as a simple advantage, her stories ask what happens when self-knowledge becomes necessary for the safety of an entire community.