The Seers Table – May 2016
Welcome to the third installment of The Seers Table—the HWA’s new hub for highlighting exciting and diverse voices in the horror/dark fantasy genre! This month we’ve an excellent collection of authors, poets, and screenwriters, including the first ever winner of HWA/StokerCon’s Scholarship from Hell!
Tananarive Due
Southern California resident, Tananarive Due is a former Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College (2012-2014), where she taught screenwriting, creative writing and journalism. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University.
Due’s 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 best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction; a paper on Due’s work recently was presented at the College Language Association (CLA) Conference.
Her first short story collection, Ghost Summer, was published by Prime Books in June of 2015. For more on Due, visit www.tananarivedue.com.
Isaac Ezban
Isaac Ezban, born in 1986 in Mexico City to a Jewish family, is a screenwriter, director, and producer who specializes in subversive horror and science fiction. Through a novel approach that marries the mysterious, the surreal, and the terrifying, Ezban has continued to solidify himself as an inventive voice in Mexican genre cinema, taking on such topics as identity, guilt, and the unknown in fresh narrative ways. His most recently penned and directed project is the Spanish language thriller The Similars (Los Parecidos), which is currently screening at a number of renowned international genre film festivals. Ezban is also in the process of filming his third feature length film Aztech. For more on Ezban, visit his IMDB page, Isaac Ezban.
Gemma Files
Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild’s 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (ChiZine Publications), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files also appears in the 2015 anthology The Humanity of Monsters. For more on Files, visit her blog at http://handful_ofdust.livejournal.com/.
Jemiah Jefferson
Jemiah Jefferson started writing fiction at the age of twelve, always with the goal of writing the material she wants to see but that doesn’t yet exist. Her interests have always included erotica, the scientific world, the macabre, comedy, and the bizarre world of celebrity and pop culture. She has also written fiction, essays, and criticism for various local newsweeklies and online culture magazines. Born in Denver, Colorado, she now lives in Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her Vampire Quartet series. Find out more at www.jemiah.com.
Sumiko Saulson
Sumiko Saulson’s blog “Things That Go Bump In My Head” focuses on horror fiction writing and features author interviews, writing advice, short stories and editorial pieces. She is the author of two novels in the science fiction and horror genres, Solitude and Warmth, and a young adult dark fantasy series, The Moon Cried Blood, which was originally a novel. Her fourth novel Happiness and Other Diseases was released in October 2014. She is also the author of a short story collection “Things That Go Bump In My Head”. She writes for the Oakland Art Scene for the Examiner.com. A published poet and writer of short stories and editorials, she was once profiled in a San Francisco Chronicle article about up-and-coming poets in the beatnik tradition. The child of African American and Russian-Jewish American parents, she is a native Californian, and was born and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles, moving to Hawaii, where she spent her teen years, at the age of 12. She has spent most of her adult life living in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more on Saulson, visit https://sumikosaulson.com.
Molly Tanzer
Molly Tanzer is the Sydney J. Bounds and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of A Pretty Mouth (Lazy Fascist, 2012), Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations (Egaeus, 2013), Vermilion (Word Horde, 2015), and The Pleasure Merchant (Lazy Fascist, 2015). She lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and a very bad cat. When not writing, she enjoys mixing cocktails, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, experimenting with Korean cooking, and (as of recently) training for triathlons. She tweets @molly_the_tanz, and blogs—infrequently—at http://mollytanzer.com.
