Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest is a "contest crossword" delivered to subscribers every week via e-mail. Each new puzzle goes out at noon Eastern Time on Fridays, and solvers have until noon ET on the following Tuesday to submit their answers on the left sidebar at www.xwordcontest.com.

If you don't know what a contest crossword is, read a brief introduction to them here. If that doesn't scare you off, e-mail me at crosswordcontest@gmail.com to receive four easy contest crosswords free of charge. Please put FOUR EASY CONTEST CROSSWORDS in the subject line of your e-mail. After that you should know whether contest crosswords are either your next obsession or just not your thing at all (there's not a lot of middle ground). If it's the first one, then welcome to my Patreon site.

I've been a professional crossword puzzle writer since 1999. I currently write for New York, The Week, The Daily Beast, Washingtonian, and The Wall Street Journal, where I contribute a contest crossword (similar to those offered here) every other Friday. My crosswords have also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Billboard, The Onion, and Wine Spectator. I've also written 29 books of crosswords, as well as the 2006 narrative book Gridlock: Crossword Puzzles and the Mad Geniuses Who Create Them.

I live in Staunton, Virginia, with my wife, who is a nurse, and our 2-year-old son, who climbs things.