R.J. Sevin

R.J. Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie-themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com.

R.J. Sevin

R.J. Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie-themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com.

R.J. Sevin

R.J. Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie-themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com.

John Langan

John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows, and two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. His third collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals, is forthcoming in 2018. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and younger son.

Dale Bailey

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, both out in 2015, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

R.J. Sevin

R.J. Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie-themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com.

Dale Bailey

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, both out in 2015, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters and Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell. He’s twice won the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards. His stories have appeared in numerous Best of the Year anthologies. Wounds, a film based on his novella “The Visible Filth,” will be released in 2019. North American Lake Monsters is in development as an anthology series at Hulu.

W.H. Pugmire

W.H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the early 1970’s, determined to show that one can write in the Lovecraft tradition and still remain original and audacious. His many books include The Tangled Muse, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams, and Gathered Dust and Others. 2013 will see the publication of two new hardcover collections, Encounters with Enoch Coffin (Dark Regions Press, written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas) and Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (Arcane Wisdom Press). Willy also has many tales in numerous forthcoming anthologies.

Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board, Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; forthcoming in 2023 from Applause Books is The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

Richard Gavin

Richard Gavin is regarded as a master of visionary horror fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H.P. Lovecraft. His work has appeared in The Best Horror of the Year, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Black Wings anthologies. His books include Charnel Wine, Omens, The Darkly Splendid Realm, and At Fear’s Altar. S.T. Joshi calls Richard Gavin, “one of the bright new stars of contemporary weird fiction.” Gavin has also published criticism in venues such as Dead Reckonings and Rue Morgue, as well as esoteric essays in Starfire Journal. His column “Echoes from Hades,” featuring various Gothic musings, can be found on the acclaimed website “The Teeming Brain.” Richard’s own website is www.richardgavin.net. He lives in Ontario, Canada.

S.P. Miskowski

S.P. Miskowski’s stories have appeared in Supernatural Tales, Horror Bound Magazine, Identity Theory, Fine Madness, Other Voices, and the anthology Detritus. Her work has received two Swarthout fiction prizes and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her supernatural thriller Knock Knock (Omnium Gatherum Media) was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. The first in a series of three Knock Knock-related novellas, Delphine Dodd is a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2013. Miskowski grew up in Decatur, Georgia and now lives in California with her husband, author Cory J. Herndon.

F. Brett Cox

F. Brett Cox’s fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. His most recently published short story, “The Amnesia Helmet,” is available at Eclipse Online. A new story, “Maria Works at Ocean City Nails,” is forthcoming in New Haven Review. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited the 2004 Tor anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (that word again…) He serves on the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Award. Brett is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University. A native of North Carolina, Brett lives in Vermont with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

Nancy Kilpatrick

Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novels, over two hundred short stories, six collections, one non-fiction book, and has edited thirteen anthologies.  Her most recent and award-winning titles are the anthology Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper, and her collection of short fiction Vampyric Variations. Current work appears in Searchers After Horror; The Darke Phantastique; Zombie Apoclaypse: Endgame!; and the upcoming Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women; The Madness of Cthulhu 2; Stone Skin Bestiary. Look for her next anthologies Expiration Date (May 2015), and nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre (fall, 2015).  Updates can be found on her website nancykilpatrick.com and on Facebook, where she invites you to join her.

Laird Barron

Laird Barron is the award-winning author of several books, including the horror collections The Imago Sequence, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His stories have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. The novella “—30—” was recently adapted as the film They Remain.

His latest novels chronicle the saga of Isaiah Coleridge, a hard boiled detective featured in Blood Standard, Black Mountain, and the forthcoming Worse Angels; all published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.

Kate Jonez

Kate Jonez writes dark fantasy fiction. Her debut novel Candy House, published by Evil Jester Press, is available at Amazon in print and ebook. Ceremony of Flies is forthcoming from Dark Fuse April 2014. She is also chief editor at Omnium Gatherum, a small press dedicated to providing unique dark fantasy, weird fiction or literary horror in print, ebook and audio formats. Three Omnium Gatherum books have been nominated for Shirley Jackson Awards. Kate is a student of all things scary and when she isn’t writing she loves to collect objects for her cabinet of curiosities, research obscure and strange historical figures and photograph weirdness in Southern California, where she lives with a very nice man and a little dog who is also very nice but could behave a little bit better.

Ramsey Campbell

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild.

Among Ramsey Campbell’s novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, and Ghosts Know. Forthcoming is The Kind Folk. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings, and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside in the UK with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at ramseycampbell.com.

Joe McKinney

Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four part Dead World series, Quarantined, Inheritance, Lost Girl of the Lake, The Savage Dead, Crooked House and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in Dead World. His latest novel is the werewolf thriller, Dog Days, set in the summer of 1983 in the little Texas town of Clear Lake, where the author grew up. In 2011, McKinney received the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. For more information, go to http://joemckinney.wordpress.com.

Nicholas Kaufmann

Nicholas Kaufmann is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated, Thriller Award-nominated, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of General Slocum’s Gold, Chasing the Dragon, Dying is My Business, and Die and Stay Dead. In addition to his own original work, he has also written for such properties as Zombies Vs. Robots and The Rocketeer. He wrote the monthly horror and dark fantasy columns for Fear Zone and The Internet Review of Science Fiction before both websites went the way of the dodo. He and his wife live in Brooklyn, NY, but you can visit him online at www.nicholaskaufmann.com.

Don D’Auria

Don D’Auria is an executive editor at Samhain Publishing, editing and directing their horror line.  He has worked in publishing for twenty-five years.  Before joining Samhain, he was an executive editor at Leisure Books, where he directed their horror line for fifteen years.  Born and raised in suburban New Jersey, he was the quintessential horror kid, growing up on a steady diet of TV’s Chiller Theater on Friday nights, Creature Features on Saturday nights, and horror novels and Famous Monsters magazine the rest of the time. He’s been lucky enough to work in the genre he’s always loved, and has been privileged to work with wonderful authors, including Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Douglas Clegg, John Everson, Stephen Laws, Edward Lee and Brian Keene. He is the recipient of an International Horror Guild Award for his contributions to the genre.

Brandon Massey

Brandon Massey is the award-winning author of several novels in the horror and suspense genres.  His most recent novel, In the Dark, was a Nook Top 100 bestseller.  Massey lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his family and can be found online at www.brandonmassey.com

Janice Gable Bashman

Janice Gable Bashman is the Bram Stoker nominated author (w/New York Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry) of  Wanted Undead or Alive (Citadel Press 2010) and Predator (YA thriller, Month9Books, coming October 2014). She is editor of The Big Thrill (International Thriller Writers’ magazine).  Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies and magazines. She has written for Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, The Writer,  Writer’s Digest, Wild River Review, and many other publications.  She is a speaker and workshop leader at writers’ conferences, including ThrillerFest, Backspace, Pennwriters, The Write Stuff, Stoker weekend, and others. She is an active member of the Mystery Writers of America, Horror Writers Association, and the International Thriller Writers, where she serves on the board of directors as Vice President, Technology.

Lucy A. Snyder

Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her story collection Soft Apocalypses will be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press in July 2014. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such asChiral Mad 2, What Fates Impose, Once Upon A Curse, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.

Lesley Bannatyne

Lesley Bannatyne is an author with five books on Halloween (covering its history, an anthology of Halloween literature, a children’s story, a how-to, and her most recent, Halloween Nation. Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night). She is also a freelance journalist, covering stories ranging from local druids to relief aid in Bolivia. Bannatyne has shared her knowledge on television specials for Nickelodeon and the History Channel (“The Haunted History of Halloween,” “The Real Story of Halloween”), with Time Magazine, Slate, National Geographic, and contributed the Halloween article to World Book Encyclopedia.

Chesya Burke

Chesya Burke has written and published nearly a hundred fiction pieces and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, noir and horror. Her story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the country. In addition, Burke wrote several articles for the African American National Biography in 2008, and Burke’s novel, The Strange Crimes of Little Africa, debuted in December 2015. Poet Nikki Giovanni compared her writing to that of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison and Samuel Delany called her “a formidable new master of the macabre.”

Burke’s thesis was on the comic book character Storm from the X-Men, and her comic, Shiv, is scheduled to debut in 2017.

Burke is currently pursuing her PhD in English at University of Florida. She’s Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Charis Books and More, one of the oldest feminist book stores in the country.

Eric J. Guignard

Eric J. Guignard writes dark and speculative fiction from the outskirts of Los Angeles. His stories and articles may be found in magazines, journals, anthologies, and any other media that will print him. He’s a member of the Horror Writer’s Association and the International Thriller Writers. Recent magazine publications include Buzzy Magazine, Beware the Dark, and Stupefying Stories ^TM. He’s also an anthology editor, including Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations andAfter Death… which were each nominated for the Bram Stoker Award®. Read his novella, Baggage of Eternal Night (nominated for the International Thriller Award), and watch for many more forthcoming books, including Chestnut ’Bo (TBP 2015). Visit Eric at: www.ericjguignard.com or at his blog:www.ericjguignard.blogspot.com.

Simon Strantzas

Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collections Beneath the Surface (2008), Cold to the Touch (2009), Nightingale Songs (2011), and Burnt Black Suns—published in 2014 by Hippocampus Press. His fiction has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, and has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, the Black Wings series, Postscripts, Cemetery Dance, and elsewhere. He was born in the cold darkness of the Canadian winter and has resided in Toronto, Canada ever since.

Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board, Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; forthcoming in 2023 from Applause Books is The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall is an award-winning Canadian author and editor. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012), was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine. It won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and was shortlisted for a 2013 Aurora Award by the Canadian Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was released in September, 2014. She lives in Oxford, England where she spends her time staring at old books.

(Photo courtesy of Emma Gorst.)

S.G. Browne

S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus and the eBook short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel. He’s an ice cream snob, a Guinness aficionado, and a sucker for dark comedy. He lives in San Francisco. You can learn more about him and his writing at www.sgbrowne.com.

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

Lynda E. Rucker

Lynda E. Rucker grew up in a house in the woods in Georgia full of books, cats and typewriters, so naturally, she had little choice but to become a writer. She has sold more than 30 short stories to various magazines and anthologies including F&SF, Nightmare Magazine, The Year’s Best Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Horror and Dark Fantasy, Supernatural Tales, and Postscripts among others and has had a short play produced as part of an anthology of horror plays on London’s West End. She won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story and is a regular columnist for UK horror magazine Black Static. Her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books, and her second, You’ll Know When You Get There, was published by Ireland’s Swan River Press in 2016.

Mike Davis

Mike Davis is the founder and editor of The Lovecraft eZine. He lives in Texas with his wife and son, one dog, five cats, and lots and lots of books.

Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is the author of seven novels including The Cabin at the End of the World, A Head Full of Ghosts, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, and The Little Sleep. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly.com, and numerous “year’s best” anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

Nancy Holder

Nancy Holder is a New York Times bestselling author (the Wicked Saga, co-written with Debbie Viguie). She has written over eighty novels ranging from books for early readers to adult horror and science fiction. Her work has appeared on the recommendation lists of the New York Public Library, the American Library Association, and the American Reading Association. She has received five Bram Stoker awards, a Scribe Award, and a Young Adult Pioneer Award. She is known for writing material based on properties such as Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf, Beauty and the Beast, Saving Grace, Hellboy, Hulk, The X-Files, and others. She has written over one hundred short stories, many appearing in Best of anthologies, and she teaches in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program offered through the University of Southern Maine. She lives in San Diego. Learn more @nancyholder and at nancyholder.com.

Lucy A. Snyder

Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her story collection Soft Apocalypses will be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press in July 2014. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such asChiral Mad 2, What Fates Impose, Once Upon A Curse, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.

Justin Bailey

Justin Bailey took his pseudonym from a video game cheat code. He was born in San Francisco and currently lives in Brooklyn like a big hipster cliché. He holds an MFA in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University and his fiction has been featured in Old Scratch and Owl Hoots: A Collection of Utah Horror. For more of his thoughts on the horror genre, check out CreatureCast.net.

Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg

Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg is the “Doctor of the Dead,” world-renowned zombie expert and co-author of Zombiemania (one of the first exhaustive guides to zombie cinema; updated edition Zombiemania Rises forthcoming). Blumberg appears in the documentary Doc of the Dead, on TV, radio, online, and teaches the University of Baltimore course “Media Genres: Zombies” that garnered worldwide coverage. A contributor to multiple essay collections on zombies, The Walking Dead, and horror, he has also presented his “Zombies: Monsters with Meaning” lecture at conventions and symposia, and his podcast Doctor of the Dead (doctorofthedead.com) is on iTunes, YouTube, and other podcast apps. Find him on Twitter @DoctoroftheDead.

Jennifer Brozek

Jennifer Brozek is a Hugo Award-nominated editor and an award-winning author. She has worked in the publishing industry since 2004. With the number of edited anthologies, fiction sales, RPG books, and nonfiction books under her belt, Jennifer is often considered a Renaissance woman, but she prefers to be known as a wordslinger and optimist. Read more about her at www.jenniferbrozek.com or follow her on Twitter: @JenniferBrozek.

Alison Littlewood

Alison Littlewood’s latest novel is The Crow Garden, a tale of obsession set amidst Victorian asylums and séance rooms. Her other books include A Cold Season, Path of Needles, The Unquiet House and The Hidden People.

Alison’s short stories have been picked for many Year’s Best anthologies and published in her collections Quieter Paths and Five Feathered Tales, a collaboration with award-winning illustrator Daniele Serra. She won the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction.

Alison lives with her partner Fergus in Yorkshire, England, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls. She loves exploring the hills and dales with her two hugely enthusiastic Dalmatians and has a penchant for books on folklore and weird history, Earl Grey tea and semicolons. You can talk to her on Twitter: @Ali__L, see her on Facebook or visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Orrin Grey

Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. His stories of ghosts, monsters, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, and been collected in Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. He can be found online at orringrey.com.

Evan J. Peterson

Evan J. Peterson is an essayist, journalist, fiction author, poet, professor, and editor living in Seattle. He’s the author of Skin Job and The Midnight Channel and editor of Lambda Award finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing can also be found in The Myriad Carnival, Nightmare Magazine’s “Queers Destroy Horror!” issue, Weird Tales, The Stranger, The Queer South anthology, Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. His first nonfiction book was published by Lethe Press in 2017, and he also reads tarot for international clients. Check out Evanjpeterson.com for more.

Molly Tanzer

Molly Tanzer is the author of Creatures of Will and Temper, Vermilion, and The Pleasure Merchant, as well as the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated A Pretty Mouth. She is also the co-editor of Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader). For more information about her critically acclaimed novels and short fiction, visit her website, mollytanzer.com, or follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram.

Dale Bailey

A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, both out in 2015, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due is the recipient of The American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award and has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in several best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy.

Livia Llewellyn

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year series, Years Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011, Lethe Press), received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and for Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Story. Her second collection, Furnace (2016, Word Horde Press), was published this year. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Facebook and Twitter.

Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared on Tor.com, Weird Tales, Best American Mystery Stories, and many other venues—much of it was recently collected in The People’s Republic of Everything. Nick is also an anthologist; his titles include the Bram Stoker Award winner Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow) and the hybrid flash fiction/cocktail recipe book Mixed Up (with Molly Tanzer).

Alyssa Wong

Alyssa Wong studies fiction in Raleigh, NC, is a John W. Campbell Award finalist, and really, really likes crows. Her story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. She can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.

Colin Dickey

Colin Dickey grew up in San Jose, California, a few miles from the Winchester Mystery House, the most haunted house in America. As a writer, speaker, and academic, he has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories all over the country. He’s a regular contributor to the LA Review of Books and Lapham’s Quarterly, and is the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He is also a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world’s relationship with mortality. With a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, he is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.

Alex Hofelich

Alex Hofelich is Co-Editor of Pseudopod, the longest running weekly short horror fiction podcast. Each episode of the podcasts typically consists of a single-narrator readings with minimal production (no dramatic adaptations, little to no production effect in a radio theater style). They run a mixture of new and classic fiction.

Since you’re reading this in the magazine or on the web, I can’t encourage you strongly enough to go add both Nightmare Magazine and Pseudopod to your favorite podcatcher.

Kat Howard

Kat Howard’s short fiction has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and was nominated for the 2013 World Fantasy Award. It has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Apex, and Subterranean, as well as other places. She currently lives and writes in the Twin Cities.

Anya Martin

Anya Martin was weaned on Friday Night Frights and, from an early age, has rooted for the monster. Her next published work, the one–act play Passage to the Dreamtime, about a Nazi officer’s prison confrontation with both his American lover and past deeds, will be published as a limited edition chapbook from Dunhams Manor Press this spring. Her fiction also has appeared in such anthologies and magazines as Eternal Frankenstein, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Giallo Fantastique, Cassilda’s Song, Xnoybis #2, Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond, Borderlands 6, Mantid Magazine, and Womanthology: Heroic. Find out more at anyamartin.com.

Rios de la Luz

Rios de la Luz is a queer xicana/chapina living in Oregon. She is in love with her bruja/activist communities in L.A., San Antonio, El Paso and Portland. She is the author of The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert via Ladybox Books. Her debut novella, Itzá, is forthcoming via Broken River Books (April 2017). Her work has been featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Entropy, The Fem Lit Magazine, Weird Sister Magazine, and St. Sucia. Her short stories have been published in Eternal Frankenstein (Word Horde) and States of Terror, Vol. 3 (Ayahuasca Publishing). Her website is riosdelaluz.wordpress.com.

John Langan

John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows, and two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. His third collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals, is forthcoming in 2018. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and younger son.

David Bowles

David Bowles is a Mexican-American author from south Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Recipient of awards from the American Library Association, Texas Institute of Letters and Texas Associated Press, he has written several titles, among them the Pura Belpré Honor Book The Smoking Mirror (a juvenile fantasy), Lords of the Earth (a Mexican kaiju novel), and the collection of speculative shorts Chupacabra Vengeance. Additionally, his work has been published in venues including Rattle, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Mithila Review, Stupefying Stories, New Myths, Electric Spec, Eye to the Telescope, Asymptote and SQ Mag.

Lee Thomas

Lee Thomas is the Bram Stoker Award- and two-time Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Stained, The Dust of Wonderland, The German, Torn, Like Light for Flies, Down on Your Knees, and Distortion, among others. His work has been translated into multiple languages and optioned for film. Lee lives in Austin, Texas with his husband, John. You can find him online at www.leethomasauthor.com.

Nathan Carson

Nathan Carson is a musician and writer from Portland, OR. He is widely known as co-founder and drummer of the internationally touring doom metal band Witch Mountain, host of the XRAY FM radio show The Heavy Metal Sewïng Cïrcle, and owner of the boutique music booking agency Nanotear. He has published articles in Rue Morgue, The Oregonian, Willamette Week, Orbitz, SF Weekly, Terrorizer, Noisey (Vice), and countless other music magazines and blogs. More recently, he has turned his sights to weird fiction, publishing short stories and novelettes in critically acclaimed horror anthologies. His first standalone novella, Starr Creek, was recently released by Lazy Fascist Press and currently sits at #1 on the Goodreads list of “Books Like Stranger Things.”

Gemma Files

Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), two chap-books of speculative poetry (Bent Under Night and Dust Radio), a Weird Western trilogy (the Hexslinger series—A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), a story-cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven) and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two upcoming story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).

S.P. Miskowski

S.P. Miskowski is a multiple Shirley Jackson Award nominee whose stories appear in numerous magazines and anthologies including Supernatural Tales, Black Static, Strange Aeons, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Looming Low, Haunted Nights, Tales from a Talking Board, and Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell. Her four-book series, the Skillute Cycle, is published by Omnium Gatherum. Her novel I Wish I Was Like You is available from JournalStone and her story collection Strange is the Night is published by Trepidatio, an imprint of JournalStone.

Kristi DeMeester

Kristi DeMeester is the author of Beneath, a novel published by Word Horde, and Everything That’s Underneath, a short fiction collection forthcoming this year from Apex Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Horror Volume 9, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volumes 1 and 3, in addition to publications such as Pseudopod, The Dark, Black Static, and several others. In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first. Find her online at kristidemeester.com.

Emily Suvada

Emily Suvada is the author of the upcoming young-adult novel, This Mortal Coil, to be published by Simon Pulse in November 2017. Emily was born in Australia, where she went on to study mathematics and astrophysics. She previously worked as a data scientist, and still spends hours writing algorithms to perform tasks that would only take minutes to complete on her own. When not writing, she can be found hiking, cycling, and conducting chemistry experiments in her kitchen. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband.

Paul Jessup

Paul Jessup is a critically acclaimed/award winning author of strange and slippery fiction. With a career spanning over ten years in the field, he’s had works published in so many magazines he’s lost count and three or four books published in the small press, with the latest being Close Your Eyes, available from Apex Books.

Gwendolyn Kiste

Gwendolyn Kiste is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, from Trepidatio Publishing; And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, from JournalStone; and the dark fantasy novella, Pretty Marys All in a Row, from Broken Eye Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, LampLight, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.

Douglas Wynne

Douglas Wynne wrote his first dark fantasy novel at age fifteen but has never found the courage to take it down from the attic and read it. After a long detour through music school, rock bands, and recording studios, he came full circle back to fiction writing and is recently the author of five novels: The Devil of Echo Lake, Steel Breeze, and the SPECTRA Files trilogy (Red Equinox, Black January, and Cthulhu Blues). His recently published short fiction includes stories in the anthologies The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, Tales from the Miskatonic Library, Shadows Over Main Street 2, and I Am the Abyss. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals.

Charles Payseur

Charles Payseur is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of all things speculative. His fiction and poetry have appeared at Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, The Book Smugglers, and many more. He runs Quick Sip Reviews and can be found drunkenly reviewing Goosebumps on his Patreon. You can find him gushing about short fiction (and occasionally his cats) on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo.

Desirina Boskovich

Desirina Boskovich’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Kaleidotrope, Fantasy & Science Fiction, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as The Apocalypse Triptych, What the #@&% Is That? and 2084. Her debut novella, Never Now Always, was published in 2017 by Broken Eye Books. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Her next project is a collaboration with Jason Heller — Starships & Sorcerers: The Secret History of Science Fiction, forthcoming from Abrams Image. Find her online at www.desirinaboskovich.com.

Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board, Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; forthcoming in 2023 from Applause Books is The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

Lucy Taylor

Lucy Taylor is the award-winning author of seven novels, including the Stoker Award-winning The Safety of Unknown Cities, six collections, and over a hundred short stories. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, and Chinese.

Her most recent short fiction can be found in the anthologies The Beauty of Death: Death by Water (Independent Legions Publishing), Tales of the Lake Volume 5 (Chrystal Lake Publishing), Endless Apocalypse (Flame Tree Publishing), Monsters of Any Kind (Independent Legions Press) and A Fist Full of Dinosaurs (Charles Anderson Books). A new collection, Spree and Other Stories, was published in February 2018 by Independent Legions Publishing.

Her short story “Wingless Beasts” is included in Ellen Datlow’s The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, to be published in late 2018.

Lost Eye Films, a UK-based, independent production company, has purchased the rights for a film version of “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” (Tor.com).

Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Halli Villegas

Halli Villegas is the author of three collections of poetry (Red Promises, In the Silence Absence Makes, and The Human Cannonball). Her book of ghost stories The Hairwreath and Other Stories came out in fall 2010 with Chizine Publications. She is the co-editor of the anthologies Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing 2012 and In the Dark: Tales of the Supernatural. Her genre work has appeared in anthologies that include Cli-Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change, Chilling Tales 2, The White Collar Anthology, Girls Who Bite Back, and Mammoth Best New Horror, 25th anniversary edition. She is a professor at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario, and also runs an editing and manuscript consulting business called In the Write Direction.

Nadia Bulkin

Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in, three of which have been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have been included in volumes of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and in venues such as ChiZine, Fantasy, and The Dark. She has two political science degrees and lives in Washington, D.C. She can be found online at nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.

Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He’s the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and the Stoker-Award-winning history of the horror paperback boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell. His latest book is We Sold Our Souls, a paranoia-inflected, heavy metal riff on the Faust legend, due out in September from Quirk Books.

Karin Lowachee

Karin was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel Warchild won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild (2002) and her third novel Cagebird (2005) were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, Jonathan Strahan and Ann VanderMeer. Her fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA.She can be found on twitter @karinlow.

A.C. Wise

A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Tor.com, and the Year’s Best Horror Volume 10, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella forthcoming from Broken Eye Books. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine, and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers. Find her online at www.acwise.net and on twitter as @ac_wise.

Nicole D. Sconiers

Nicole D. Sconiers is an author hailing from the sunny jungle of Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, where she began experimenting with womanist speculative fiction and horror. She is the author of Escape from Beckyville: Tales of Race, Hair and Rage. Her short story “Kim” was published in Sycorax’s Daughters, a black woman’s horror anthology that was recently nominated for a Bram Stoker award. Most recently, her short story “The Stiffening” appeared on an episode of Nightlight, the black women’s horror podcast. Her short story “The Eye of Heaven” appeared in the anthology Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, published February 2019 by BLF Press.

Cadwell Turnbull

Cadwell Turnbull is a graduate from the North Carolina State University’s Creative Writing MFA in Fiction and English MA in Linguistics . He was the winner of the 2014 NCSU Prize for Short Fiction and attended Clarion West 2016. His debut novel, The Lesson, set in near-future U.S. Virgin Islands after an alien colonization, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His Nightmare story “Loneliness is in Your Blood” was selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. His Asimov’s novelette “Other Worlds and This One” was also selected by the anthology as a notable story.

Richard Thomas

Richard Thomas is the award-winning author of eight books—Disintegration and Breaker (Penguin Random House Alibi), Transubstantiate, Herniated Roots, Staring Into the Abyss, Tribulations, Spontaneous Human Combustion (Turner Publishing), and The Soul Standard (Dzanc Books). He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Thriller, and Audie awards. His over 165 stories in print include The Best Horror of the Year (Volume Eleven), Behold!: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders (Bram Stoker winner), Cemetery Dance (twice), PANK, storySouth, Gargoyle, Weird Fiction Review, Shallow Creek, The Seven Deadliest, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad (numbers 2-4), PRISMS, and Shivers VI. Visit www.whatdoesnotkillme.com for more information.

Nibedita Sen

Nibedita Sen is a queer Bengali writer, editor and gamer from Calcutta. A graduate of Clarion West 2015, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Podcastle, Nightmare, Fireside and The Dark. She helps edit Glittership, an LGBTQ SFF podcast, enjoys the company of puns and potatoes, and is nearly always hungry. Hit her up on Twitter at @her_nibsen.

Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson has published more than 160 books, 56 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune universes, as well as unique steampunk fantasy novels Clockwork Angels and Clockwork Lives, written with legendary rock drummer Neil Peart, based on the concept album by the band Rush. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series, the Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, the Saga of Shadows trilogy, and his humorous horror series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie PI. He has edited numerous anthologies, written comics and games, and the lyrics to two rock CDs. Anderson and his wife Rebecca Moesta are the publishers of WordFire Press.

Aaron Duran

Aaron Duran is a writer in Portland, OR. He’s the founder and co-host of the popular podcast, Geek in the City Radio. Aaron is an author of multiple comic books, including his creator-owned series Dark Anna and the Pirates of Kadath and Dial F for Foodie, as well as the Forgotten Tyrs young adult horror series of novels. Aaron draws much of his literary inspiration from the creepy folktales told to him by his small but feisty abuela. When he isn’t writing, you can find Aaron in the kitchen. Where he spends time coming up with tasty recipes and experimental beer and cider brewing for his incredibly supportive wife to enjoy.

Kaaron Warren

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books. Find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she Tweets @KaaronWarren.

Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board, Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; forthcoming in 2023 from Applause Books is The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels—most recently, The Dark Net—three story collections—including Suicide Woods—and a book of essays titled Thrill Me that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. His sci-fi trilogy—The Comet Cycle—will be published in 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been optioned by the Russo brothers (Avengers: Endgame). He is part of the new Dawn of X-Men at Marvel and writes both Wolverine and X-Force. He has also written for DC Comics and Dynamite Entertainment and is known for his celebrated runs on Green Arrow, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and James Bond. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire (where he was a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review. He wrote two seasons of the audio drama—Wolverine—produced by Marvel and Stitcher. The first season, “Wolverine: The Long Night,” was listed as one of the top 15 podcasts of the year by Apple and won the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast. His other honors include the Whiting Award, an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, and Best American Comics.

Micah Dean Hicks

Micah Dean Hicks is a Calvino Prize-winning author whose writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, and Kenyon Review, among others. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams is available from New American Press. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. His new novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is available from John Joseph Adams Books.

Caitlin Starling

Caitlin Starling is a writer of horror-tinged speculative fiction of all flavors. Her first novel, The Luminous Dead, is out now from HarperVoyager. Caitlin also works in narrative design for interactive theater and games, and has been paid to design body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia. Find more of her work at www.caitlinstarling.com and follow her at @see_starling on Twitter.

Nino Cipri

Nino Cipri is a queer and nonbinary/trans writer, currently at work on an MFA at the University of Kansas. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. Their writing has been published by Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Interfictions, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, and other fine venues. You can connect with Nino on Facebook and Twitter @ninocipri, or on their website, ninocipri.com.

Paul Jessup

Paul Jessup is a critically acclaimed/award winning author of strange and slippery fiction. With a career spanning over ten years in the field, he’s had works published in so many magazines he’s lost count and three or four books published in the small press, with the latest being Close Your Eyes, available from Apex Books.

Evan J. Peterson

Evan J. Peterson is an essayist, journalist, fiction author, poet, professor, and editor living in Seattle. He’s the author of Skin Job and The Midnight Channel and editor of Lambda Award finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing can also be found in The Myriad Carnival, Nightmare Magazine’s “Queers Destroy Horror!” issue, Weird Tales, The Stranger, The Queer South anthology, Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. His first nonfiction book was published by Lethe Press in 2017, and he also reads tarot for international clients. Check out Evanjpeterson.com for more.

Gwendolyn Kiste

Gwendolyn Kiste is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, from Trepidatio Publishing; And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, from JournalStone; and the dark fantasy novella, Pretty Marys All in a Row, from Broken Eye Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, LampLight, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.

Ian McDowell

Ian McDowell is the author of the novels Mordred’s Curse and Merlin’s Gift. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance and the anthologies Love in Vein, October Dreams 2 and the Science Fiction Book Club’s Best Short Novels 2005. He grew up in Fayetteville, NC, and currently lives in Greensboro, NC. In February of 2020, he won first prize in investigative journalism at the North Carolina Press Association Awards for his coverage of the case of Marcus Deon Smith, an African-American man fatally hogtied by the Greensboro police during the 2018 NC Folk Festival. That same month, his Alphabestiary: 26 Poems and Drawings for Easily Alarmed Children and the Adults Who Like to Alarm Them, was published by AM INK.

Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World. He has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award five times and he has been included in The Year’s Best Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the International Horror Award for best story collection), The Warren, A Collapse of Horses, Immobility, and Altmann’s Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim Award. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

Tim Waggoner

Tim Waggoner has published over forty novels and five collections of short stories. He writes original dark fantasy and horror, as well as media tie-ins, and his articles on writing have appeared in numerous publications. He’s won the Bram Stoker Award, the Horror Writers Association’s Mentor of the Year Award, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Scribe Award. He’s also a full-time tenured professor who teaches creative writing and composition at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio. His latest release is Writing in the Dark, a book on writing horror.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Suyi Davies Okungbowa is the Nigerian speculative fiction author of the godpunk novel, David Mogo, Godhunter (Abaddon, 2019). His internationally published fiction and nonfiction have appeared at Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Podcastle, The Dark, and other periodicals and anthologies. He lives between Lagos, Nigeria and Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches writing to undergrads and is completing his MFA in Creative Writing. He tweets at @IAmSuyiDavies and is @suyidavies everywhere else. Learn more at suyidavies.com.

Premee Mohamed

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Analog, Escape Pod, Augur, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel, Beneath the Rising, is out now from Solaris Books, with the sequel due out in 2021. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and on her website at premeemohamed.com.

Octavia Cade

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She’s sold over 50 stories to markets including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Shimmer. A recent novel, The Stone Wētā, was published by Paper Road Press, and her first collection, The Mythology of Salt and Other Stories, came out in 2020 from Lethe Press. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016, and was the 2020 visiting writer at Massey University. She is an HWA member and Bram Stoker nominee.

J.B. Toner

J.B. Toner studied Literature at Thomas More College and holds a black belt in Ohana Kilohana Kenpo-Jujitsu. He has published two novels, Whisper Music and The Shoreless Sea, and innumerable shorter works. Toner lives and works in Massachusetts with his beautiful wife and their beloved daughters, Sonya Magdalena and Rebecca Eowyn.

Orrin Grey

Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. His stories of ghosts, monsters, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, and been collected in Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. He can be found online at orringrey.com.

Justin C. Key

Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer, psychiatrist, and a graduate of Clarion West 2015. His short stories have appeared and are forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Escape Pod, and Interstellar Flight Magazine. He is currently working on a near-future novel inspired by his medical training. His novella, Spider King, is set to be released by Serial Box in early 2021. When Justin isn’t writing, working in the hospital, or exploring Los Angeles with his wife, he’s chasing after his two young (and energetic!) sons and marveling over his newborn daughter.

Donald McCarthy

Donald McCarthy is a writer and teacher from New York. He’s had essays appear with Salon, The Huffington Post, Paste Magazine, and more. His fiction has appeared in The Grey Rooms Podcast, Raconteur Literary Magazine, The Manhattanville Review, New Myths Magazine, and a host of other places. His website is donaldmccarthy.com.

Stephanie Malia Morris

Stephanie Malia Morris is a graduate of the 2017 Clarion West Writers Workshop, recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Award, and a 2019 Kimbilio Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in FIYAH, Pseudopod, Nightmare, Apex Magazine, and Lightspeed. She has narrated short fiction for the Escape Artists podcasts, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can find her online at stephaniemaliamorris.com or on Twitter at @smaliamorris.

Richard Fairgray

Richard Fairgray is a writer, artist, and colorist, best known for his work in comic books such as Blastosaurus and Ghost Ghost, and picture books such as Gorillas in Our Midst, My Grandpa Is a Dinosaur, and If I Had an Elephant. As a child he firmly believed he would grow up and eat all the candy he wanted and stay up as late as he liked. By drawing pictures when he wasn’t meant to and reading all the things people told him not to, he has made his dream come true. Black Sand Beach is his first graphic novel series with Pixel+Ink. Richard splits his time between Los Angeles and Surrey, British Columbia, where he is able to work furiously, surrounded by plastic skeletons, dogs, friends, loved ones (and possibly the most comprehensive collection of Courtney Love bootlegs on the planet).

John Wiswell

John (@Wiswell) is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Pseudopod. Horror has scared the will to live into him on many nights, so he writes to pay back the debt.

Jose Cruz

Jose Cruz is a children’s librarian and author of dark fiction. His work has appeared in print and digital venues including Rue Morgue, Diabolique, The Terror Trap, Classic-Horror.com, Nightscript, and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror. “The Shepherd,” his third published story, was long-listed for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. Find out more at hauntedcruz.com.

Christa Carmen

Christa Carmen’s debut collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, was published in 2018 by Unnerving, and additional work has been featured in Fireside Magazine, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, as well as the Bram Stoker-nominated Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaption. When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens, uses a ouija board to ghost-hug her dear departed beagle, and reads books like Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein and The Ghastlycrumb Tinies to her daughter. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briers only to disappear.

Cynthia Pelayo

Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo is a two-time Bram Stoker Awards nominated poet and author. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, and Poems of My Night, all of which have been nominated for International Latino Book Awards. Poems of My Night was also nominated for an Elgin Award. Her recent collection of poetry, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, explores true crime, that of the epidemic of missing and murdered women in the United States, and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and Elgin Award. Her modern day horror retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, Children of Chicago, was released by Agora / Polis Books in 2021.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Columbia College, a Master of Science in Marketing from Roosevelt University, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Cina was raised in inner city Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children. Find her online at cinapelayo.com and on Twitter @cinapelayo.

Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board, Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; forthcoming in 2023 from Applause Books is The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

Jason Marc Harris

Jason Marc Harris graduated with a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington, and an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University, where he served as Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. Exposed to Edward Gorey’s work (The Insect God, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Wuggly Ump) by kindergarten, Jason has been on an inevitable trajectory towards uncanny and sinister narratives ever since. Creative work in journals such as Apex and Abyss, Arroyo Literary Review, Bull, Cheap Pop, EveryDay Fiction, Marvels and Tales, Masque and Spectacle, Midwestern Gothic, The Offbeat, Psychopomp Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Writing Texas. His novella of weird horror, Master of Rods and Strings (Vernacular Books), was released in print and Kindle July 2021. He teaches creative writing, folklore, and literature, and is the Creative Writing Coordinator at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX.

Simon Strantzas

Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collections Beneath the Surface (2008), Cold to the Touch (2009), Nightingale Songs (2011), and Burnt Black Suns—published in 2014 by Hippocampus Press. His fiction has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, and has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, the Black Wings series, Postscripts, Cemetery Dance, and elsewhere. He was born in the cold darkness of the Canadian winter and has resided in Toronto, Canada ever since.

Dante Luiz

Dante Luiz is an illustrator, editor, and occasional writer from an island in southern Brazil. He’s also art director for Strange Horizons, and has edited an anthology and two magazines while he juggles art, fiction and non-fiction. He’s the interior artist for Crema (comiXology/Dark Horse), and his work with comics has also appeared in anthologies, like Wayward Kindred (TO Comix Press), Mañana: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century (Power & Magic Press), and Shout Out (TO Comix Press), among others. His rare prose pieces can be found on Constelación Magazine, Professor Charlatan Bardot Travel Anthology (Dark Moon Books) and Mafagafo Revista. Find him online on Twitter (@dntlz), Instagram or his website (danteluiz.com).

Neil McRobert

Neil McRobert is a writer, researcher and the host of Talking Scared podcast. After completing a PhD on Gothic and horror he fled the halls of academia to live in an old, haunted village in the north of England. There, he interviews luminaries from the world of horror and writes about things the polite folk don’t mention.

Ally Wilkes

Ally Wilkes is a British author of supernatural, cosmic, and weird horror. Her debut novel, All the White Spaces, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist, and her critically-acclaimed second novel, Where the Dead Wait, was released in late 2023. Ally’s short fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including Nightmare, Three Crows, FOUND: an anthology of Found Footage Horror, and others. Ally lives in Greenwich, London, with an anatomical human skeleton and far too many books and plants. You can find them on X @UnheimlichManvr or on Instagram @av_wilkes.

Richard Thomas

Richard Thomas is the award-winning author of eight books—Disintegration and Breaker (Penguin Random House Alibi), Transubstantiate, Herniated Roots, Staring Into the Abyss, Tribulations, Spontaneous Human Combustion (Turner Publishing), and The Soul Standard (Dzanc Books). He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Thriller, and Audie awards. His over 165 stories in print include The Best Horror of the Year (Volume Eleven), Behold!: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders (Bram Stoker winner), Cemetery Dance (twice), PANK, storySouth, Gargoyle, Weird Fiction Review, Shallow Creek, The Seven Deadliest, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad (numbers 2-4), PRISMS, and Shivers VI. Visit www.whatdoesnotkillme.com for more information.

Alex Woodroe

Alex Woodroe is a Romanian writer and editor of dark speculative fiction. She’s a member of SFWA and HWA, an acquiring editor for Tenebrous Press, and a staff writer for the videogame Decarnation. Among her latest publications, her Weird SF “Midnight Sun” appeared in Dark Matter Magazine, and her Folk Horror “Abandon” in Horror Library Volume 7. She’s passionate about infusing her country’s culture, food, and folklore into her work, and loves talking shop at @AlexWoodroe.

Daniel David Froid

Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona and has published fiction in The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, and elsewhere.

L. Marie Wood

L. Marie Wood is an award-winning dark fiction author, screenwriter, and poet with novels in the psychological horror, mystery, and dark romance genres. She won the Golden Stake Award for her novel The Promise Keeper.  She is a MICO Award nominated screenwriter and has won Best Horror, Best Action, Best Afrofuturism/Horror/Sci-Fi, and Best Short Screenplay awards in both national and international film festivals. Wood’s short fiction has been published in groundbreaking works, including the Bram Stoker Award Finalist anthology, Sycorax’s Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire. Wood is the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, and a horror scholar.  Learn more about L. Marie Wood at www.lmariewood.com.

Melanie R. Anderson

Melanie R. Anderson is an associate professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She is the co-author of the Bram Stoker and Locus award-winning book Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction (2019). In addition to academic essays related to the supernatural and horror in American literature, she is the author of Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013). She has co-edited three academic essay collections: The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013), Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016), and Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House (2020). She also co-hosts two podcasts about horror: The Know Fear Cast and the Monster, She Wrote Podcast.

Brian McAuley

Brian McAuley is an HWA author whose debut novel Curse of the Reaper will be published by Talos Press on October 4th, 2022. His short story “H.I.D.E.” can be found in Dark Matter Magazine’s Issue 010. Brian’s produced credits as a WGA screenwriter range from family sitcoms to horror films. He received his MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia University, and he currently lives and teaches writing in Los Angeles. Connect with him on social media @BrianMcWriter.

Raja Abu Kasm

Raja Abu Kasm is a mess masquerading as a mess. When he’s not writing fiction (or at least what he passes off as fiction), he’s trying to figure out why no one appreciates the minutiae of pop culture trivia. You can find them on Twitter @RajaAbuKasm.

May Haddad

May Haddad is a writer who has a hard time admitting she’s a writer. Her work has been featured in The Markaz and Nightmare Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @MayHaddadWrites — if she can find the time to post.

Eric Raglin

Eric Raglin (he/him) is a Nebraskan speculative fiction writer and the owner of Cursed Morsels Press. His debut short story collection is Nightmare Yearnings, and his second collection, Extinction Hymns, is out December 2022. He is the editor of Shredded: A Sports And Fitness Body Horror Anthology and Antifa Splatterpunk. Find him at ericraglin.com or on Twitter @ericraglin1992.

James Chambers

James Chambers received the Bram Stoker Award® for the graphic novel, Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe and is a four-time Bram Stoker Award nominee. He is the author of the story collections On the Night Border and On the Hierophant Road, which Booklist called “…satisfyingly unsettling” in a starred review, and the novella collection, The Engines of Sacrifice. He has written the novellas Three Chords of Chaos, Kolchak and the Night Stalkers: The Faceless God, and many others, including the Corpse Fauna cycle: The Dead Bear Witness, Tears of Blood, The Dead in Their Masses, and The Eyes of the Dead. His writing has appeared in numerous anthologies. He edited the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign, and co-edited the anthologies A New York State of Fright and Even in the Grave. His website is: www.jameschambersonline.

Rena Mason

Rena Mason was born in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand. She is a first-generation American horror and dark speculative fiction author of Thai Chinese descent and a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. Her co-written screenplay RIPPERS was a 2014 Stage 32/The Blood ListPresents®: The Search for New Blood Screenwriting Contest Quarterfinalist. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, The International Screenwriters Association, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, and the Public Safety Writers Association. She currently resides in the Great Lakes State of Michigan. For more information about Rena, visit: www.RenaMason.Ink.

For more on this topic, her essay “Lady Nak of Phra Khanong: A Life Inspired by the Female Duality Archetype” appears alongside 21 personal essays by other Asian horror writers in Unquiet Spirits, edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, February 2023.

Jonathan Lees

Jonathan Lees originally hails from a shuttered mill town in New England and now can be spotted lurking in the alleys of New York or deep within the barrens of New Jersey. In 2022, he unleashed “Power Out, Wind Howling” for the spirited anthology Even in the Grave, edited by James Chambers and Carol Gyzander, “They Are Still Out There, You Just Can’t See Them Anymore”, the closing story in Doug Murano’s The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors, “It Comes in Waves” within Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology by Rena Mason and Vince Liaguno, and “Persistence” kicks off Michael Bailey’s Chiral Mad 5.

Rae Knowles

Rae Knowles (she/her) is a queer woman with multiple works forthcoming from Brigids Gate Press. Her debut novel, The Stradivarius, is coming May ’23; her sapphic horror novella, Merciless Waters, is due out winter ’23, and her collaboration with April Yates, Lies That Bind, in early ’24. A number of her short stories have been published or are forthcoming from publications like Dark Matter Ink, Seize the Press, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Nosetouch Press. Recent updates on her work can be found at RaeKnowles.com and you can follow her on twitter @_Rae_Knowles.

Jonathan H. Smith

Jonathan H. Smith, M.D. (he/him) is a neurologist with over 50 peer-reviewed publications in medical and scientific journals. He is an avid horror fan, and resides with his family in Chicago, IL. Twitter: @JHSmithMD

Zachary Rosenberg

Zachary Rosenberg is a Jewish horror writer living in Florida. He crafts horrifying tales by night and by day he practices law, which is even more frightening.  His forthcoming debut novellas will be published by Brigids Gate Press and Of Limits Press. You may find his works released or forthcoming with Seize the Press, Dark Matter Magazine, and The Deadlands. Follow him on twitter at @ZachRoseWriter

Suzan Palumbo

Suzan Palumbo is a Nebula and WSFA Small Press Award finalist, active member of the HWA, and Co-Administrator of the Ignyte Awards. Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection Skin Thief: Stories will be published by Neon Hemlock in Fall 2023. Her writing has been published by or is forth coming in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, PseudoPod, Fireside Fiction Quarterly, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins, and other venues. Her full bibliography can be found at: suzanpalumbo.wordpress.com She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and tweets at @sillysyntax. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, she has lived most of her life in Ontario, Canada. When she isn’t writing, she can be found sketching, listening to new wave, or wandering her local misty forests.

L. Marie Wood

L. Marie Wood is an award-winning dark fiction author, screenwriter, and poet with novels in the psychological horror, mystery, and dark romance genres. She won the Golden Stake Award for her novel The Promise Keeper.  She is a MICO Award nominated screenwriter and has won Best Horror, Best Action, Best Afrofuturism/Horror/Sci-Fi, and Best Short Screenplay awards in both national and international film festivals. Wood’s short fiction has been published in groundbreaking works, including the Bram Stoker Award Finalist anthology, Sycorax’s Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire. Wood is the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, and a horror scholar.  Learn more about L. Marie Wood at www.lmariewood.com.

JP Bradham

JP Bradham is an award winning female filmmaker and producer based out of Los Angeles. Always putting her work as a writer at the forefront of her passion for film, JP was a part of the first selected group of screenplay writers for the Sundance Co//ab Screenplay writing course, she has since completed a total of four programs under the Co//ab program and went on to receive continued mentorship with notable WGA writers over the past decade. With a passion for horror, JP continues to write, film and produce projects within the genre.

Zachary Gillan

Zachary Gillan (he/him) is a critic of weird fiction who resides in Durham, North Carolina. He’s an editor at Ancillary Review of Books, the book reviewer for Seize the Press, and has criticism in or forthcoming from Strange Horizons, Broken Antler, IZ Digital, and Nightmare Magazine, among others. More of his work can be found at doomsdayer.wordpress.com.

Ed Grabianowski

Ed Grabianowski is a writer of fantasy and horror from Buffalo, NY. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, as well as the anthologies Chilling Horror Short Stories, Geek Love, and Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), and he’s written non-fiction for Apex, Clarkesworld, and io9. He’s also the singer in a band called Spacelord.

Kelsea Yu

Kelsea Yu is a Taiwanese Chinese American writer who is eternally enthusiastic about sharks and appreciates a good ghost story. She has over a dozen short stories and essays published in or forthcoming from Clarkesworld, Fantasy, PseudoPod, and elsewhere. Her novella, Bound Feet, was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and her debut novel, It’s Only a Game, will be published by Bloomsbury Children’s in 2024. Find her on Instagram and other social media as @anovelescape or visit her website kelseayu.com. Kelsea lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, children, and a pile of art supplies.

Jenny Kiefer

Jenny Kiefer is a Kentucky native and avid rock climber. Together with her mother, she is the owner and manager of Butcher Cabin Books, an all-horror bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. This Wretched Valley is her debut novel. She has also been published in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Pseudopod, and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

J.D. Harlock

In addition to their work at Solarpunk Magazine as a poetry editor, and at Android Press as an editor, J.D. Harlock’s writing has been featured in Strange Horizons, New York University’s Library of Arabic Literature, and the SFWA Blog. You can find them on Twitter, Threads, & Instagram @JD_Harlock.

Corey Farrenkopf

Corey Farrenkopf is a Cape Cod-based writer and librarian. His work has been published in/is forthcoming from The Deadlands, Tiny Nightmares, Bourbon Penn, Flash Fiction Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, will be published by JournalStone in April of 2024. Follow him on Twitter at @CoreyFarrenkopf, on TikTok as @CoreyFarrenkopf, or on instagram as @Farrenkopf451…or if that isn’t enough, at his website: CoreyFarrenkopf.com

Haralambi Markov

Haralambi Markov is a Bulgarian fiction writer, reviewer & editor with a background in content creation, who currently works as a freelance writer. He was the first ever Bulgarian to be accepted to attend the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2014. His short story “The Language of Knives” was long-listed for the Nebula award for Best Short Story. His work has appeared in TOR.com, Uncanny Magazine, Evil in Technicolor, Weird Fiction Review, Stories for Chip, Eurasian Monsters and Lackington’s. He was part of the team of BonFIYAH 2021.

Emmett Nahil

Hailing from a haunted seaside town in Northeastern Massachusetts, Emmett Nahil is the author of From the Belly (Tenebrous Press, 2024) and Let Me Out (Oni Press, 2023), and a writer of horror and speculative fiction centering marginalized perspectives. His writing has been featured in The Book of Queer Saints, Volume II, Laura Kate Dale’s Gender Euphoria anthology, and elsewhere. Favoring the historic, the strange, and the gory, in his other life Emmett makes video games as Narrative Director and co-founder of Perfect Garbage Studios. He can be found most places online as @_emnays.

RSL

RSL (he/they) is a writer and academic of weird, absurd fiction. He is doing an AHRC-funded PhD on the importance of New Weird fiction to mental health in marginalised communities. When he isn’t avoiding his PhD work, he’s writing about his nightmares and playing games. They are also an associate editor with Haven Spec magazine. Read his work published in and forthcoming from CHM, Vastarien, and Apparition Lit.

Neal Auch

Neal Auch is an artist and author with a keen interest in death, decay, and 17th-century Dutch still life. Neal’s prose has been published in various outlets, including Nightmare Magazine, The Deadlands, and the Cinnabar Moth e-zine. His photography has been exhibited in galleries and featured in a number of fine art books, magazines, and blogs of questionable repute. Neal’s clients include Paramount Pictures, Grindhouse Press, and Weirdpunk Books. He can be found online at www.nealauch.com.

Emily C. Hughes

Emily C. Hughes (she/her) wants to scare you. Formerly the editor of Unbound Worlds and TorNightfire.com, she writes about horror and curates a list of the year’s new scary books. Her first book, Horror For Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch, will hit shelves in September 2024 from Quirk Books. You can find her writing elsewhere in the New York Times, Vulture, Reactor, Electric Literature, Thrillist, and more. Emily lives in crunchy western Massachusetts with her husband and four idiot cats. For more, find her at readjumpscares.com.

Nicholas Belardes

Nicholas Belardes’s fiction combines elements of literary fantastic, fantasy, eco-horror, and science fiction. His obsession with nature, history, and the world’s ongoing climate disasters, blended with a daily birdwatching habit, fills his prose with not just warblers and flycatchers but also other obscurities from the natural world. He earned his MFA at University of California Riverside’s Palm Desert Low Residency where he received the Founder’s Award. The Deading is his debut horror novel. You can find him online at nicholasbelardes.com.

Sofia Ajram

Sofia Ajram (he/she/they) is a metalsmith and literary horror writer who specializes in feverish stories of anomalous architecture and queer pining. He is the editor of Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror. She has also given lectures on contemporary horror films at Monstrum Montreal and serves as a moderator of r/horror on Reddit. Their debut novella with Titan Books is entitled Coup De Grâce. Sofia lives in Montreal with their cat Isa.

Lora Senf

Lora Senf is a writer of dark and twisty stories for all ages. She is the author of The Blight Harbor Books including The Clackity and the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Nighthouse Keeper. She lives in Eastern Washington with her husband, their twins, and one large, orange cat who thinks he’s a person. Their house is probably haunted.

Jamie Zaccaria

Jamie Zaccaria is a wildlife biologist by trade and writer by pleasure. She currently works for an ocean exploration organization and writes fiction in her spare time. She has been published in over a dozen anthologies, online magazines, and her debut short story collection, Lavender Speculation, was released in 2023 by Wildling Press. She lives in NJ with her furbabies and wife.

Priya Chand

Priya Chand grew up in California and currently resides in the Chicagoland area. When she’s not reading or writing, she does martial arts, volunteers as a forest steward, and takes naps. She is co-editor on Reckoning 9. Find her online at priyachandwrites.wordpress.com.

Zoe Kerr

Zoe Kerr is a director and writer based in Dallas and Los Angeles. Between working as a dramaturg for a movement theater company, educating youth on parole, and being the only woman working in a finance office, she writes genre scripts and short stories. Her writing and direction has been recognized by the Sundance Institute, Slamdance Screenplay Competition, the Austin Film Festival, Launch Pad, the Moonshot Initiative, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Arts Residency, and the Dramatists Guild, among others.

Kyle Tam

Kyle is a writer, game designer, and full-time complainer from the Philippines. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications like Clarkesworld, Interstellar Flight Press, Strange Horizons, and Into the Spine. Her games include the IGDN Honorable Mention MORIAH, Primadonna from PlusOneEXP, and Forsaken from Afterthought Committee. You can find her on Bluesky at @PercyPropa, or find her work at whatkylewrites.carrd.co.

Michael Knost

Michael Knost is a Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor and author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers. He has written in various genres and helmed multiple anthologies. He received the Horror Writers Association’s Silver Hammer Award in 2015 for his work as the organization’s mentorship chair. He also received the prestigious J.U.G. (Just Uncommonly Good) Award from West Virginia Writer’s Inc. His Return of the Mothman is currently being filmed as a movie adaption. He has taught writing classes and workshops at several colleges, conventions, online, and currently resides in Chapmanville, West Virginia with his wife, daughter, and a zombie goldfish.

Maria Alexander

Maria Alexander is a multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author who lives in Los Angeles. The protagonist of her YA historical fantasy Brimstone & Blades is the queer 17th-century duelist known as La Maupin. Her duel with the devil begins on June 3, 2025. Learn more at www.mariaalexander.net.

Zachary Gillan

Zachary Gillan (he/him) is a critic of weird fiction who resides in Durham, North Carolina. He’s an editor at Ancillary Review of Books, the book reviewer for Seize the Press, and has criticism in or forthcoming from Strange Horizons, Broken Antler, IZ Digital, and Nightmare Magazine, among others. More of his work can be found at doomsdayer.wordpress.com.

David Agranoff

David Agranoff is a novelist, screenwriter, and a Horror and Science Fiction critic. He is the Splatterpunk and Wonderland book award-nominated author of 13 books including  the WW II Vampire novel The Last Night to Kill Nazis, the science fiction novel Goddamn Killing Machines from CLASH BOOKS, the cli-fi novel Ring of Fire, Punk Rock Ghost Story and People’s Park from Quoir books. As a critic he has written more than a thousand book reviews on his blog Postcards from a Dying World, which has recently become a podcast, featuring interviews with award-winning and bestselling authors such as Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Alma Katsu and Josh Malerman.

For the last five years David has co-hosted the Dickheads podcast, a deep-dive into the work of Philip K. Dick reviewing his novels in publication order as well as the history of Science Fiction. His non-fiction essays have appeared on Tor.com, NeoText, and Cemetery Dance. He just finished writing a book, Unfinished PKD on the unpublished fragments and outlines of Philip K. Dick. His newest novel from Quoir books is Great America in Dead World (July 2025), it is an experimental science fiction novel written using the formul Philip K. Dick laid out in a five-page letter to a friend in the ’60s.