NORTHAMPTON — When Florence resident Bryan Kaproth-Gerecht was newer to crossword construction, they made crossword puzzles as gifts for loved ones’ birthdays and anniversaries. But on Tuesday, millions of people will see their crossword when it’s recognized at a level only a very small percentage of puzzles ever reach: being published in the New York Times.
“It’s really exciting. … Most of [my] puzzles have made it into the hands of five to 10 people, and so the leap to however big the New York Times audience [is], is not small. It’s really cool to think about so many people hearing my voice and solving my puzzle,” they said.
In industry terms, Bryan Kaproth-Gerecht, 41, is both a constructor and a solver. They only began designing their own puzzles in December 2024, but the foundation was laid years earlier in college, when filling out the daily grid was a staple of visiting their parents.
“Going home, there would be a crossword on the table, and we’d, with the parents, fill it out, a little here, a little there, so I had some familiarity with them,” they said.
It was on a trip to Mexico at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that Bryan and their spouse Katy Kaproth-Gerecht picked up a cheap book of crosswords. When they got home, Katy got a subscription to the New York Times, and the two started working on the newspaper’s crossword daily.
“It was the bright spot in COVID,” Katy said. “It was a daily thing that was new.”
“We got to be creative together, we got to see how smart each other [was] in very different ways — like, ‘How did you come up with that answer?’ It’s such a cool thing,” Bryan said.
Bryan first conceived the idea for the puzzle in Tuesday’s paper in February 2025, but bringing it to life took “many waves of iterations.” It involved “working on it a little bit, thinking, ‘Eh, that’s not working,’ setting it aside, and mothballing it for a moment to work on another puzzle.” That work turned into a six-month cycle of “picking it up randomly and chatting with other people about it to try to get it to work,” they said.
Bryan submitted the puzzle to the Times about a year ago, and they didn’t hear that it would be accepted for publication until last December. This was the fourth crossword puzzle they’d submitted to the Times; the previous three were rejected, which is common for constructors. The paper turns away 97% of the submissions it receives.
“This puzzle is significantly more elegant than any other puzzle I’ve created. … It might be years before I have one that works this nicely and fits so perfectly and uses graphics,” they said.
At 74 questions, the puzzle has four fewer words than a typical Tuesday crossword in the Times. “I know four words doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually a much more complicated grid to construct. It’s just the only one that would actually fit this topic,” Bryan said.
The puzzle also has “so little jargon,” they added, and “very few acronyms — or if it is an acronym, it’s one you know. … There’s no big proper names in this puzzle, which I really love. I think pretty much everybody’s gonna know 95% of the words in this puzzle, and a lot of them are fun.”
Without spoiling the puzzle, its theme is something “science-y” that “every human over the age of 6” would know, Katy said. “Once people know what the theme is, it will really help them throughout the puzzle.”
The grid itself is also arranged in a way that ties into the theme, which, in crossword construction, is called “grid art.” When the Kaproth-Gerechts spoke with the Gazette on Monday, they hadn’t yet seen if it was going to be animated for digital solvers, though they hoped it would because Bryan had proposed an animation when they submitted the puzzle.
Bryan said that as far as they know, they’re the second openly nonbinary crossword constructor to have had a crossword published in the Times. It’s normal for crossword editors to change clues in the editing process, but when a Times editor changed a clue for a specific term, replacing it with a scientific definition of the word rather than one relating to a practice traditionally associated with women, Bryan gently pushed back on the change.
“I got to go back to them with the feedback on that clue and be like, ‘Actually, I want a more feminine approach to this. I want that adjustment. That is my voice.’ And I really love that I get to have my voice in that sort of platform,” they said.
Having a crossword published in the New York Times comes with both bragging rights and a paycheck. A crossword constructor gets $500 for each of their first two Monday-to-Saturday puzzles that are published in the paper, and $750 each for any subsequent puzzles selected. Sunday puzzles, whose grids are 21 squares by 21 squares rather than 15 by 15, start at $1,500 for each of the constructor’s first two published puzzles and $2,250 apiece after that.
The Kaproth-Gerechts plan to spend some of the money on “a really nice date,” Bryan said, but otherwise, they’ll use it for various life expenses. They have another plan to celebrate, too: the couple are members of the Jones Library Community Gaming Group in Amherst, and on Tuesday night, the group members will solve the crossword together in small groups, and Bryan will teach people how to construct crosswords — and they’ll have cake.
Beyond that, though, “Am I gonna be doing this in 20 years? I don’t know,” Bryan said. “Right now, it’s so great for my brain. I love it. And I love that there are multiple outlets [through which] I can get this into other people’s hands, and my voice can be on their breakfast table as they’re solving a puzzle. I think it’s really neat.”
