Nicole Cushing is the Bram Stoker Award® winning author of Mr. Suicide and a two-time nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award. Rue Morgue recently included her in its list of thirteen Wicked Women to Watch, praising her as “an intense and uncompromising literary voice.” She has also garnered praise from the late Jack Ketchum, Thomas Ligotti, and Poppy Z. Brite. Her second novel, A Sick Gray Laugh, was recently released by Word Horde.

“Renaissance woman” is a phrase we really don’t hear enough, and fortunately, talking about Lois H. Gresh gives us a perfect way to put it to use. Since her first short story (“Cafebabe,” from the science fiction anthology Infinite Loop) was published in 1993, she has written psychological horror, Lovecraftian fiction, weird fiction, thrillers, young adult novels, mystery tales, pop culture science books, and companion books to popular young adult series.

Gabino Iglesias is an Austin-based writer who seemed to pop up on a lot of readers’ radar over the last year. His “mosaic novel” Coyote Songs, which chronicles the lives of immigrants, families, and artists living and moving along the border, has earned him rave reviews, a Bram Stoker Award nomination for Fiction Collection, and a reputation as a breakout Latinx horror author. Coyote Songs is Iglesias’ fourth novel (following the bizarro book Gutmouth, the underwater horror novel Hungry Darkness, and the acclaimed Zero Saints, which is the first work to explore what he calls “barrio noir”).

Emil Ferris is a Chicago-based artist in her fifties who began working on the book after barely surviving a bout of West Nile Virus in 2002. Doctors told her that she was likely to be paralyzed for life, but, after her daughter taped a pen into her hand and got her drawing again, she recovered. After completing the graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris received forty-eight rejections until Fantagraphics picked it up, eventually deciding to split the massive tome into two parts (although Book Two was originally slated for release in late 2017, Ferris decided to continue work on it, and it’s now set for a 2019 publication).

As an author, Amber Fallon has been publishing unabashed “guilty pleasure” horror for years. In addition to her novels The Terminal and The Warblers, her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and her own collection, TV Dinners from Hell. This September, Fallon made her editorial debut with Fright into Flight (Word Horde, 2018)—a dark speculative anthology themed around flight and featuring only women contributors. This anthology was conceived of in direct response to the similarly titled Flight or Fright (Cemetery Dance, 2018) which, despite sharing the theme, only included stories by men.

Linda D. Addison is one of the most honored speculative poets of all time. Over the course of more than 300 published poems, stories and articles, Addison has been awarded the Horror Writer Association’s Bram Stoker Award six times. In 2001, she became the first African-American to receive a Stoker for her superior achievement in poetry with the collection Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes. Most recently, she was honored with the HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.

Before her 2017 book Drawn to the Dark: Explorations in Scare Tourism Around the World, author Chris Kullstroem had written books about Halloween celebrations and how to throw great murder mystery parties, and had blogged about Halloween haunts (and the haunters who stage them). But then she decided to try something completely different: she quit her job, gave up her apartment, stashed her possessions, and traveled the world for a year to see how other cultures celebrate monsters and the art of the playful scare.

Three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee S.P. Miskowski was raised in Decatur, Georgia, but later moved to the Pacific Northwest. After receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, she seemed poised for a career as a writer of mainstream fiction (she cites Flannery O’Connor as an early influence), but instead found her way into the horror genre. She debuted with Knock Knock, the first of a series of books set in the fictional town of Skillute.

In 2014, a horror novel by a young writer named Josh Malerman was released by HarperCollins’ Ecco Press imprint to starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Malerman had never been published before, because (talk about dream day jobs!) he’d been touring for years as frontman for the band the High Strung, who scored when their song “The Luck You Got” was chosen as the theme song for the Showtime series Shameless. Since Bird Box, Josh has published an impressive array of short stories, novellas, introductions, and—just released in May—his second novel, Black Mad Wheel.