A Point of Pride: Interview with Brent Lambert

Brent Lambert is a Black, queer man who heavily believes in the transformative power of speculative fiction across media formats. As a founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine, he turned that belief into action and became part of a Hugo Award-winning team. He resides in San Diego, but spent a lot of time moving around as a military brat. His family roots are in the Cajun country of Louisiana. Currently, he has a novella A Necessary Chaos upcoming from Neon Hemlock and is part of the upcoming cyberpunk/solarpunk anthology Fighting the Future and Black horror anthology All These Sunken Souls.…

A Point of Pride: Interview with James Lefebure

James Lefebure is a Scottish-born, Liverpool-living horror author. Splitting his time between watching horror, reading horror and writing horror, he can often be found arguing with people that Jason would whoop Michael. His two novels The Books of Sarah and God In The Livingroom have proven to his long-suffering, fantasy-reading husband that James will probably never write a story about dragons or an orphan with a destiny. He's a part of two LGBT horror anthologies—We're Here and The Horror Collection: LGBTQIA Edition. He can be found on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. He does have a Twitter, but doesn’t understand how it…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Arley Sorg

Arley Sorg is an associate agent at kt literary and co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. He is an SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist, a two-time Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is also a senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He is a guest critiquer for the current Odyssey Workshop and the week five instructor for this year's Clarion West Workshop. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Vince A. Liaguno

Vince A. Liaguno is an award-winning writer, anthologist, editor, and an occasional poet. He is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor of Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (co-edited with Chad Helder), the acclaimed Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology (co-edited with Rena Mason), and the forthcoming Unspeakable Horror 3: Dark Rainbow Rising. His debut novel, 2006’s The Literary Six, was a tribute to the slasher films of the eighties and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY). Healthcare administrator by day, pop culture enthusiast by night, his jam: books, slasher films, and Jamie Lee Curtis. He is a member (and…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Corey Niles

Corey Niles was born and raised in the Rust Belt, where he garnered his love of horror. His debut horror novel, Blood & Dirt, was released from NineStar Press in August 2022. His writing has appeared in over twenty publications, including issues, anthologies, and collections from Nightmare Magazine, the Horror Writers Association, Ghost Orchid Press, and Lycan Valley Press. You can keep up to date with his recent and forthcoming publications at coreyniles.com. What inspired you to start writing? From an early age, I loved storytelling. I think it was the escapism. Hanging up my problems for a couple of…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Joshua Viola

Joshua Viola is a 2021 Splatterpunk Award nominee, Colorado Book Award winner, and editor of the StokerCon™ 2021 Souvenir Anthology. He is the co-author of the Denver Moon series with Warren Hammond. Their graphic novel, Denver Moon: Metamorphosis, was included on the 2018 Bram Stoker Award® Preliminary Ballot. Viola edited the Denver Post #1 bestselling horror anthology Nightmares Unhinged, and co-edited Cyber World—named one of the best science fiction anthologies of 2016 by Barnes & Noble. His first novel, The Bane of Yoto, won the USA Best Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, International Book Awards, and Independent Publishers Book…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Gretchen Felker-Martin

Gretchen Felker-Martin is Massachusetts-based horror writer and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, is out now from Tor Nightfire. You can follow her work @scumbelievable on Twitter. What inspired you to start writing?  I don’t think it was any one thing. Bob Flanagan, the famous masochist and performance artist, had a wonderful spoken-word poem about the roots of his masochism, and he lists just hundreds and hundreds of factors, and it’s like that for me. The woods of rural New Hampshire, Monica Furlong, James Gurney’s Dinotopia, my childhood asthma, watching Clive Barker movies and Alien too young, being bullied for…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Koji Suzuki

Koji Suzuki is a Japanese writer, who was born in Hamamatsu and lives in Tokyo. Suzuki is the author of the Ring novels, which have been adapted into other formats, including films, manga, TV series and video games.  Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so why? If not, what were you writing initially and what compelled you to move into horror? My first novel Paradise was a love story in the South Pacific during the Age of Discovery (my second novel was Ring) and my third novel was also situated in the South…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Lisa Tuttle

Lisa Tuttle, a Texan by birth, Scottish by inclination and residence, is the author of 13 novels and seven short story collections. Windhaven, written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, was her first novel and his second and has been almost continuously in print since 1981. She’s also written non-fiction and books for children and worked as a journalist and library assistant. The Curious Affair of the Missing Mummies, the third in a series of 1890s-set, supernaturally tinged mysteries, is forthcoming from Jo Fletcher Books, as well as a new collection, Riding the Nightmare, is out from Valancourt this summer.…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Christine Sng

Christina Sng is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares, A Collection of Dreamscapes, and Tortured Willows. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and art appear in numerous venues worldwide, including Interstellar Flight Magazine, New Myths, Penumbric, Southwest Review, and The Washington Post. FB, Instagram, Twitter: @christinasng What inspired you to start writing? When I played as a child, I was always telling a story. Writing allowed me to immortalize it on paper.   What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? I grew up with it. The 80s was the golden age of…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro started writing stories at age six; she's still at it. Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so why? If not, what were you writing initially and what compelled you to move into horror? I started out just writing stories of the kind that I like to read, and most of those were genre fiction. I began mainly with fantasy—not entirely fantasy, but for the most part fantasy—and since I’d read an awful lot of science fiction in my late youth and early teens, I decided I'd try my hand at…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Nancy Holder

Nancy Holder is the former vice president and former board member of HWA. She is New York Times bestselling author of over a hundred book-length projects and hundreds of short stories, essays, and articles. She has received 7 Bram Stoker Awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association and was named Faust Grand Master from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. She is known for writing material for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other intellectual properties, as well as novelizing movies such as Wonder Woman and Crimson Peak. She taught in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Paula Guran

Editor, anthologist, and reviewer Paula Guran has edited more than fifty science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies and more than fifty novels and collections featuring the same. She was senior editor for Prime Books for seven years. Previously, she edited the Juno fantasy imprint from its small press inception through its incarnation as an imprint of Pocket Books. Guran edits the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series (first ten volumes with Prime; now published by Pyr). In an earlier life, she produced the weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Stokers, an IHG award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination), edited Horror…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Kathryn Ptacek

Kathryn Ptacek is the editor of the landmark Women of Darkness I and Women of Darkness II, published at a time when most anthologies included few or no women writers. She knew they were out there, though. She has published numerous novels, short stories, articles, reviews, and poetry in various genres. She edits the monthly HWA Newsletter. She is also the recipient of three of HWA’s awards: The Silver Hammer Award, the Mentor of the Year Award, and the Richard Laymon President’s Award. Her books are available on Amazon and from Crossroad Press as e-books. She also sells extra copies…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Bryan Thao Worra

Bryan Thao Worra is the author of 10+ books. One of the first Lao Americans to arrive in the US in 1973, and the first Lao American to hold a professional membership in the Horror Writers Association. He holds over 20 national and international awards for his writing and community leadership. He served as the president of the International Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association from 2016-2022. He has presented at the Smithsonian and the 2012 London Summer Games on the role of the imagination and memory in creative writing as a poet and prose writer, focusing on the creative…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Nisi Shawl

Nisi Shawl’s debut novel Everfair, an alternate history of Africa’s Congo region, was a Nebula Award finalist. They’re the author of the Otherwise Award-winning story collection Filter House. They edited both volumes of the acclaimed New Suns anthology series, winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, and Ignyte awards. With Cynthia Ward they co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusivity for over a decade. Recent publications include the horror collections Our Fruiting Bodies and Exploring Dark Short Fiction 3: A Primer to Nisi Shawl, as well as Speculation, a middle grade fantasy novel about redeeming a…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Tracie McBride

What inspired you to start writing? My origin story is probably a very familiar one to most writers. It started early in childhood with a love of books and a reverence for those who created them. Then, in primary school, praise came from teachers for my early efforts at written storytelling. High school hit, then adulthood, and somewhere along the line, I shelved the childhood dream of becoming a writer. I picked it up again when my first child started school and I undertook online study to earn a Creative Writing Diploma, naively thinking I might have time to devote…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stephen Gallagher

Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for his short fiction, Stephen Gallagher has built a career both as a novelist and as a creator of primetime miniseries and episodic television. In the US he was lead writer on NBC's Crusoe and creator of CBS Television's Eleventh Hour. His fifteen novels include Chimera, Oktober, and Valley of Lights. He's the creator of Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy, in a series of novels that includes The Kingdom of Bones, The Bedlam Detective, and The Authentic William James.…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Terry Dowling

Terry Dowling is author of Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award winner for Best Collection 2007), An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Blackwater Days, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, its “premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows and its “most acclaimed writer of the dark fantastic” by Cemetery Dance magazine. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its twenty-one year run than any other writer. Terry’s…

Pacific Islander Heritage: Interview with Del Gibson

Del Gibson lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Gibson has had 26 short stories digitally published, as well as several articles and poems. When Gibson isn’t writing, she is researching and reading. She is actively engaged in the writing community by helping other horror authors. She is a Beta and ARC reader, and part of launch teams to promote other authors' work. Gibson runs a popular Facebook group called HORROR CENTRAL, and collaborates with YouTube Podcasts where her short stories are read out by narrators. Gibson is an author of horror, but also reviews horror movies, books and music, on YouTube…