Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and University of Kansas’s MFA program, Nino’s fiction has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, Lambda, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. 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.

One time, an angry person on the internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny.

Nino’s 2019 story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize and was chosen as one of the top ten books on the ALA’s Over the Rainbow Reading List. Their novella Finna—about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes—was published by Tor.com in 2020, and its sequel Defekt was released in April 2021. Nino’s YA horror debut, Dead Girls Don’t Dream, will be published by Holt Young Readers in 2024. They also write a sporadic newsletter, COOL STORY, BRO, about narrative storytelling and how cool it is. They are represented by DongWon Song of the Howard Morhaim Agency.

Thanks so much for taking the time to chat, Nino! Could you introduce yourself and your work to those that don’t know you yet?

Hello! My name is Nino, I am a trans and queer writer, wandering writing teacher, and cat dad. I would probably die in the first ten minutes if I were a character in a horror movie. My latest book is Dead Girls Don’t Dream, a queer YA folk horror novel.

Dead Girls Don’t Dream is a wild and exciting novel. Where did the initial concept for this come from? I know that this was related to a story you published here in Nightmare: “Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out!” How did that story influence this novel? Was there anything you brought from that story into the novel?

I wrote “Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You?” in 2017. That idea originally came from a constant annoyance I had with horror/thriller media, where dead children (especially girls) often act as objects of pathos for adults, rather than characters in their own right or stars of their own stories. I couldn’t find a story to go with that premise, but formatting the story as a personality quiz allowed me to sort of skate past the need for a real plot. But I realized I wasn’t done with them yet. I aged the characters up to young adults instead of children, and in 2019 it became the first novel I ever finished. Then I spent two and a half years revising it so much that it bears almost no resemblance to the original short story.

There are only a few things in the short story that really carried over: Madelyn’s name and her scars, Jane Doe’s look and vibe. What really compelled me into committing to a novel was Sadie/Riley’s relationship with her family, how her death and resurrection estranges her from them, of how to deal with people who love you, but can’t look at you without thinking of what was done to you.

I love learning how writers put their own spin on the Process. What did writing Dead Girls Don’t Dream look like? What sorts of things—techniques, stylistic choices—did you want to try with this story that you haven’t tried in others?

MESSY. After finishing the first draft and doing some light revisions on it, I sold Dead Girls in March of 2020, right before NYC shut down in the early pandemic. The edit got delayed, I wrote another book in the interim, and by the time I came back to it, both the world and I had completely changed. I ended up with terrible writer’s block while rewriting it, and the revising got . . . drastic. At one point, I tried to make it into a road trip novel with a cult? At another, it was a portal fantasy with an evil children’s book author as the antagonist. I blew a lot of deadlines and felt like a failure for a while.

I couldn’t find a foothold in the story until I made it a lot more personal. I set it in the New England I know, with a main character who is dealing with a legacy of neglect and addiction along with The Horrors™. I did a lot of research—as a way of figuring out folk horror and how I wanted to write it, but also into child placement, addiction, all of the bureaucracy that families get fed to when they fall apart. I ended up with a book that was a lot more complex and messy in some ways, and one that feels much closer to my heart.

Still, RIP to that first book. It was fun.

You have quite the eclectic collection of different stories and novellas that you’ve published over the years. You’ve got anti-capitalist stories, beautiful stories about queer relationships, gnarly horror stories . . . Are there any themes or motifs that you tend to return to in your writing, whether that’s unconscious or not?

I think all my stories end up being queer, anti-capitalist, and with bits of gnarly horror interspersed with humor plopped throughout them. That’s just what I like to do. I think all writers end up reusing the same ingredients over and over in different ratios.

Do you find yourself drawn to specific mediums over others—shorts, novellas, novels, et cetera? Which is your favorite to work in, if you have one?

Short stories have become a real struggle to write since I started working in longer formats, but I miss writing them. I really like how much room there is to fuck around in a novel, and I like the wiggle room in novellas.

In Dead Girls Don’t Dream, Voynich Woods becomes just as much a character as Riley and Madelyn. What is it about woods and forests that so many stories are set in those locations?

I thought about this a lot while writing and rewriting Dead Girls, so I’ll just reuse the answer I added to the book:

In stories, the forest stands in opposition to the safety net of civilization: known versus unmapped, dark versus light. We don’t know what lives there. We might not want to know. But we can’t seem to stay away from it. Some go into the woods to take a shortcut. Some go to find their fortune, or to ask for the impossible. And some go to escape. Even believing that the woods are filled with monsters, and maybe especially because of that.

What was your experience with writing a dual narrative? Did you run into any challenges writing Riley and Madelyn?

In earlier iterations, Riley and Madelyn had emotional affectations that were a little too similar, and expressed their feelings in the same way (usually through anger and resentment). It took a lot of tweaking before I figured out their dynamic.

I also struggled with how to fold their romance into the story. Where was I supposed to fit a feelings confession in around all the trauma? I liked how it ended up. After my wife read it, she told me that only I could make someone stapling another’s wounds shut romantic.

There’s an undercurrent theme of magic and folklore as addicting loops. Did you come to this theme naturally?

Interesting! I didn’t really think of them that way, but I did try to use magic and folklore as coping mechanisms for different characters. And like most coping mechanisms, they can become unhealthy or have unintended consequences.

We have the witch, the woods, and spells in this story. But what we also get is a storied history of Roscoe, its people, and the surrounding area. It certainly feels like a Rust Belt town come to life. How did Roscoe and Voynich Woods come together?

When I mention growing up in Vermont, most people imagine a childhood that looks like an L.L. Bean catalog. But I grew up working class, with a single mother, in a generation that got hit very hard by the opioid epidemic. When I decided to set Dead Girls in New England, it was the one I grew up with and the one my friends and family still live in. Beautiful, pastoral, and with its share of ugly problems.

This story is also very much about understanding and reckoning with cycles of violence over the course of generations. Undoing harm requires understanding what that harm is, the longer-reaching consequences of it, and seeing beyond your own circumstances. That kind of story requires a wider scope.

I liked some of the epistolary elements within the story. What made you decide to add in Toby’s article at the end of some of the chapters?

There had always been a separate narrative voice in this book, outside of the main characters’ points of view. In earlier versions it was a kind of chorus of the dead, who sometimes spoke directly to the characters, sometimes directly to the audience. It was very fun and cool, but at some point, it no longer fit with the story I had. So I gave that job to Toby, who is kind of my favorite character: the folklorist, the historian, the one who takes refuge in all of these stories.

You’ve run some horror writing courses in the past. What is your teaching philosophy when it comes to writing?

1. Learning a creative craft should be pleasurable, even when it’s also frustrating. Teaching should also be pleasurable, even when it’s annoying.

2. Telling someone something is rarely as effective as encouraging them to fuck around so they can figure it out themselves.

3. “Interesting question! I have thoughts, but I want to hear what other people think before I answer.” Or: let students teach each other (and you!)

4. Some creative writing teachers consider it a duty to winnow out “bad” or “untalented” writers from a class, to discourage them from writing what they like, or encourage them to quit. That’s fucking heinous, and a monumental failure from a pedagogical perspective. So I try to teach in a way that would annoy those people.

Why horror? I know that seems like an out-of-nowhere question, but I always find it interesting why folks choose horror over, say, some of the other speculative genres.

I’ve loved horror since I was a kid. It was a genre that always felt like it loved me back, even though it showed affection by giving me nightmares. Horror creates awe and wonder in mundane places. It made room for my anxieties instead of dismissing them. And as someone who went through a few of what psychologists now call “adverse childhood events,” it was also weirdly comforting? It affirmed that, yeah, actually sometimes everything does go wildly, horribly wrong; sometimes you’re out of your depth, and out of good options. But you fight back anyway.

So you’ve got Dead Girls Don’t Dream coming out soon, but what’s next for you? What else are you working on?

I’m currently working on my second YA horror book, tentatively titled Every Room a Hunger. It’s a haunted house story set in a fucked up residential facility for troubled teens. It’s slated for publication in spring of 2026.