Interviews

Steven Clapp is a horror and speculative fiction author from Southern California.  His past publication credits include a poem in the Horror Writers Association poetry anthology, Poetry Showcase Vol. 9 along with several short stories published in San Diego Writers Ink's annual anthology, A Year in Ink (Vol.12-15) as well as winning San Diego Writers Ink's Edgar Allan Poe Short Story Contest in 2018. Prior to that, his story "Freak"  was published in the Australian e-zine The Mind Creative. April, 2014) What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve…

Lori R. Lopez wears many hats as an award-winning Author and Poet.  She is also an Artist, Songwriter-Musician, Actress, Filmmaker, Tree-Hugger, Activist, Vegan, and Animal-Lover.  Lori roamed graveyards as a kid and conducted funerals for dead birds, squirrels, insects and spiders.  Her offbeat books include The Dark Mister Snark, An Ill Wind Blows, Darkverse:  The Shadow Hours, Odds & Ends, The Fairy Fly, Leery Lane, and The Witchhunt.  Stories and verse have appeared in The Sirens Call, Spectral Realms, Space & Time, JOURN-E, The Horror Zine, Weirdbook, Bewildering Stories, Impspired, Altered Reality, Aphelion, Oddball Magazine, Terror Tract; Anthologies such as…

Cassondra Windwalker has roamed the South, the Midwest, the West, and currently haunts the Frozen North in the company of a tolerant husband, a zombie cat, a ghost dog, and a miscellany of ghasts who sometimes share their stories over a cup of tea (or a dram of whisky.) Her novels and full-length poetry collections are available in bookstores and online. She enjoys interacting with creatives and reasonably decent people of all sorts on Twitter @WindwalkerWrite. What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve into the darker side of…

Tania Chen is a Chinese-Mexican queer writer of living nightmares. Their work was selected for Brave New Weird Anthology by Tenebrous Press, and has also appeared in Unfettered Hexes by Neon Hemlock, Apparition Lit, Strange Horizons, Pleiades Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Longleaf Review, The Dread Machine among others. They are a graduate of the Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop of 2021 and a recipient of the HWA’s Dark Poetry Scholarship. Currently, they are assistant editor at Uncanny Magazine and can be found on twitter@archistratego or mastodon at @archistratego@wandering.shop What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or…

John Claude Smith has had three collections and two novels published, along with tales and/or poems in Vastarien, Pluto in Furs, the HWA Poetry Showcase series, and many more magazines and anthologies. His debut novel, Riding the Centipede, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist. He is presently shopping two novels—one weird horror, one a non-traditional spin on vampires and werewolves—and an apocalyptic, music-based horror novella. Another novel is in final revisions, while there’s a fiction collection and a poetry collection in the works, too. Busy is good. He splits his time between the East Bay across from San Francisco, and…

Naomi Simone Borwein is a poet and academic. Her work appears or is forthcoming across a spectrum of publications: Space & Time Magazine, HWA Poetry Showcase IX (featured Poet), Beautiful Tragedies III, dancing girl press, Ghost City Review, Grim & Gilded, Ghostlight, Farside Review, Superpresent Magazine, Soliloquies Anthology, and elsewhere. Naomi is a past head poetry editor of Swamp Writing (2018-2022)—and a reader for Thanatos Review. Her academic writing spans from Horror and the Gothic into Experimental Mathematics education and mathematical philosophy. What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to…

J.E. Erickson is the author of Offerings to the Flower Moon: The Tale of the Abrams Witch (October 2022) and Dust Bunnies From Hell (October 2023). He currently writes horror and fantasy stories, and lives in an old house in the Midwestern United States with a nerdy soap maker, two spoiled dogs, and a (potentially) possessed vegetable garden. You can visit him at jeericksonwriting.com or on Twitter @maladjustined. What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve into the darker side of poetry? Poetry has always been difficult for me,…

Janine Cross is the author of Touched by Venom, voted by Library Journal as one of the top five sci-fi/fantasy novels of 2005 and the first book in The Dragon Temple Trilogy. She's also the author of Shadowed by Wings, Forged by Fire, and a literary novel, The Footstop Cafe. As a private pilot, she occasionally writes articles for aviation magazines. She’s in a long-term relationship with the semi-colon but flirts outrageously with the comma splice. You can find her at: janinecross.ca Perfectly Reasonable Interview Questions That I Nonetheless Struggled to Answer. What sparked your interest in horror poetry?  The…

Brianna Malotke is a member of the Horror Writers Association based in Washington. Her poetry is in The Spectre Review and The Nottingham Horror Collective. You can find more of her horror work in the anthologies Beautiful Tragedies 2, The Dire Circle, Under Her Skin, Their Ghoulish Reputation, Out of Time and HorrorScope. In fall of 2022 her debut poetry collection, Don’t Cry on Cashmere, was published by Ravens Quoth Press. Looking to 2023, she will be a "Writer in Residence" at the Chateau d’Orquevaux in France and her first horror poetry collection Fashion Trends, Deadly Ends will be released.…

Sumiko Saulson is a Bram Stoker Nominated poet for their 2022 collection The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry (Dooky Zines), and an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror whose latest novel Happiness and Other Diseases is available on Mocha Memoirs Press. Winner of the HWA Scholarship from Hell (2016) BCC Voice "Reframing the Other" contest (2017), Mixy Award (2017),  Afrosurrealist Writer Award (2018), HWA Diversity Grant (2020),  HWA Richard Laymon Presidents Award (2021), Ladies of Horror Fiction Readers Choice Award (2021) Sumiko has an AA in English from Berkeley City College, writes a column called…

Saytchyn Maddux-Creech survived the MFA program at Colorado State University with their love of all things creepy intact. Saytchyn’s stories and poems can be found in numerous journals, many under the name Sandra Maddux-Creech. They live in northern Colorado with their partner and several beloved familiars. What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve into the darker side of poetry? In kindergarten, I fell in love with a folk song our teacher taught us about a skeletal ghost. The song was called, “The Ghost of John.” I couldn’t write…

Teel James Glenn has killed hundreds and been killed more times--on stage and screen, as he has traveled the world for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He is proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn’s last Stunt double and been beaten up by Hawk on Spenser for Hire TV show. He did over two hundred episodic appearances on Soap operas, 70 feature films and 60 renaissance festivals all over the country. His poetry and short stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, Mystery Weekly, Pulp Adventures, Space…

Rook Riley is the author of short stories in the following anthologies: Queens and Courtesans, A Lone Star in the Sky, Rebels and Revenants, Strange Afterlives, and Witches and Warriors. After the military and then the  Department of Defense took them to live on both coasts and smack in the Midwest, they moved back home to Texas. Currently, they are employed as a middle school teacher (Welcome to body horror at its finest!) and a freelance developmental editor. In addition, they also write horror novels, game in tabletop RPGs, practice Krav Maga, and spoon warfare. Hobbies include binge-watching streaming services and collecting tattoos. What sparked your…

Hillary Dodge is an award-winning editor and author of several speculative short fictions and poetry, as well as three nonfiction books. She spends a good deal of time traveling, going places that are forbidden, and eating. She once had tea with a Roma in a cave in the mountains of Spain. Another time found her eight hours from civilization in the heart of the Atacama with a mad desert hermit. She has been published in online magazines, podcasts, and print anthologies, including Pseudopod, the HWA Poetry Showcase, Space Squid, Hellbound Books, D&T Publishing, & Hex Publishers. She is a co-editor…

K. H. Vaughan is a refugee from academia with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In that life he taught and worked in a variety of settings, and was particularly interested in the methodology and philosophy of science, decision theory, forensic issues, mass violence, and psychopathology. He is a writer of dark fiction and poetry and Director of Programming for NecronomiCon - Providence. What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve into the darker side of poetry? I had little interest in poetry of any kind for a very long…

Jacqueline West’s poetry has appeared in Mythic Delirium, Dreams & Nightmares, Liminality, Enchanted Living, and Star*Line. Her collection Candle and Pins: Poems on Superstitions was released in 2018. She is also the author of the New York Times-bestselling middle grade series The Books of Elsewhere, the YA horror novel Last Things, and several other dark and twisty books for young readers. A three-time nominee for both the Rhysling Award and the Pushcart Prize, Jacqueline lives with her family in Minnesota. Find her on Instagram @jacqueline.west.writes or at jacquelinewest.com.  What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event…

R. Leigh Hennig is an author, editor, and poet living amongst the memories of witches and other dark things in coastal New England. His work has appeared in anthologies that have been finalists for the Bram Stoker Award, and that have won the Saturday Visitor Award for works inspired by Poe (so named after the prize won by Poe himself). Find him at https://semioticstandard.com, Twitter, or Mastodon. What sparked your interest in horror poetry? Was there a particular event or work that inspired you to delve into the darker side of poetry? I never really understood poetry. I struggled with…