A Point of Pride: Interview with Marisca Pichette

Marisca Pichette is a bisexual author, writing about all kinds of monsters. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, PseudoPod, Apparition Lit, Grimdark Magazine, Uncharted Magazine, The NoSleep Podcast, Fusion Fragment, and PodCastle, among others. She lives in Western Massachusetts, collecting fragments. What inspired you to start writing? My main inspiration when I began writing was the beauty of language. I loved creating lush imagery, drawing on the natural world and books I was reading by long-dead white men. I didn’t realize at first how limited these stories were. As my writing developed, I began searching for the…

A Point of Pride: Interview with David Demchuk

I'm David Demchuk, author of The Bone Mother and RED X, and I would be happy to be interviewed as part of the HWA Pride Month LGBTQ+ author interviews. I live in Toronto, Canada and have been writing for print, stage, digital and other media for more than 40 years. My debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian…
A Point of Pride Series

A Point of Pride Series

E.F. Schraeder is the author of the queer gothic novella Liar: Memoir of a Haunting (Omnium Gatherum, 2021), the queer monster tale As Fast as She Can (Sirens Call Publications, 2022), a story collection, and two poetry chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Dancing in the Shadows: A Tribute to Anne Rice, What Remains, Lost Contact, Mystery Weekly Magazine, Strange Horizons, and other journals and anthologies. Schraeder’s nonfiction has appeared in Vastarien: A Literary Journal; Radical Teacher; the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom blog, and elsewhere. Current creative projects include a monster’s coming-of-age novella and a full-length manuscript of poems.…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Usman T. Malik’s

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Usman T. Malik’s fiction has been published at Al-Jazeera, WIRED, Center for Science and Imagination (Arizona State University), in New Voices of Fantasy and several year’s best anthologies including The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Locus, and Eugie Foster awards, and has won the Bram Stoker and the British Fantasy awards. Usman’s debut book Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan won the 2022 Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in Arts (IAFA) and was on Washington Post’s 2021 list of best new science fiction and fantasy collections.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Doungjai Gam

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doungjai gam is the author of glass slipper dreams, shattered  and watch the whole goddamned thing burn. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in LampLight, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Wicked Haunted, The Dystopian States of America, among other places. She’s co-written stories with her partner, author Ed Kurtz, that have appeared in Lost Highways and The Bad Book.

gam—a Thai-Lao-Eastern European blend—was born in Thailand and currently resides in southern New England.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with K.P. Kulski

K.P. Kulski is the author of Fairest Flesh, from Strangehouse Books and House of Pungsu, from Bizarro Pulp Press. Her short fiction has appeared in various publications including Fantasy Magazine, and anthologies, Not All Monsters, from Strangehouse Books and The Dead Inside, from Dark Dispatch. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Korean mother and American-military father, she spent her youth wandering many places both inside and outside the United States. She’s a veteran of the U.S. Navy and Air Force and as a former history professor, she often draws inspiration from the stories of the past. Find her at garnetonwinter.com and on Twitter @garnetonwinter. What inspired you to…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Gabriela Lee

Gabriela Lee teaches creative writing and children's literature at the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines. Her fiction has been published in the Philippines and abroad, most recently in the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (New Zealand, 2020). She received the 2019 PBBY-Salanga Grand Prize, which was published as the picture book Cely’s Crocodile: The Story and Art of Araceli Limcaco-Dans (Tahanan Books, 2020). She recently contributed the chapter "Digital Liminality and Identities in Philippine Young Adult Speculative Fiction" to Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age:…

The HWA Honors Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Horror Writers

Dear HWA Members and Horror Writing Community, May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States. Over the past several weeks, as I have engaged in conversations with friends, colleagues, and even relatives (as I grew up in Hawaii from age 11 onward and have cousins who are Native Hawaiian) I have come to realize that I have inadvertently contributed to the erasure of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders by not explicitly including them in the call for Asian & Asian Diaspora horror writers this May. Pacific Islandera, Pacificer, Pasifika, or Pasefika are the…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Paul Loh

Paul Loh is a musician/actor/author. He has written around 100 songs. He has also appeared in several movies. He has written two novellas: 'The Nocent part 2: Advent of the Scathing' and 'The Greater Number' and edited a trilogy of horror anthologies of short horror stories called 'Possessions'. His story, 'Smart Phone' is in post-production to be made into a movie. He has a collection of his own short horror fiction out, called Solace In Solitude. A second collection of his stories called, Pockets Of Humanity will be out by the end of 2022. He is currently working on a…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Kiyomi Appleton Gaines

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Kiyomi Appleton Gaines is a writer of fairy tales and other fantastical things. She was a 2018 Contributing Editor at Enchanted Conversation, and contributor to Mad Scientist Journal 2019 Spring Quarterly. Her work has also appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, and The Grimm Reaper. Find more of her writing at a work of heart and follow her on Twitter @ThatKiyomi. Kiyomi is an Asian-American of Japanese descent. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, two marmalade cats, and a snake.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Lee Murray

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Lee Murray is an author, editor, screenwriter, and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. A USA Today Bestselling author, double Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award winner, her work includes military thrillers, the Taine McKenna Adventures, supernatural crime-noir series The Path of Ra (with Dan Rabarts), and short fiction collection, Grotesque: Monster Stories.  Lee is the curator-editor of eighteen volumes of dark fiction, among them Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (with Geneve Flynn). Lee’s first poetry collection, Tortured Willows, is a collaboration with Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng and Geneve Flynn. Read more at https://www.leemurray.info/

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Nadia Bulkin

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Nadia Bulkin is the author of the short story collection She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017). She has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award five times. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia with her Javanese father and American mother, before relocating to Lincoln, Nebraska. She has two political science degrees and lives in Washington, D.C.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Grace Chan

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Grace Chan is an Aurealis and Norma K Hemming Award-nominated speculative fiction writer. She can’t seem to stop scribbling about brains, minds, space, technology, and identity. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fireside, Aurealis, and many other places. Her debut novel, Every Version of You, will be published in August 2022.

Grace was born in Malaysia and lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her other interests include salt-and-vinegar anything and secretly filming her friends’ NYE karaoke highlights. In a decaffeinated state, she may cease to exist. You can find her online at www.gracechanwrites.com and on Twitter as @gracechanwrites.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Elaine Cuyegkeng

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Elaine Cuyegkeng is a Chinese Filipino writer. She grew up in Manila where there are many, many creaky old houses with ghosts inside them. She loves eldritch creatures both real and imaginary, ’80s pop stars, and caffeinated drinks with too much sugar. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner, their faerie child and their two small cat children. She is the 2021 Eugie Foster Award recipient for “The Genetic Alchemist’s Daughter” and has been nominated for the BSFA, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. She has been published in the Bram Stoker winning anthology Black Cranes:Tales of Unquiet Women, in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, The Dark, and Rocket Kapre. You can find her on @layangabi on Twitter.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with J.A.W. McCarthy

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Photo by Jenny Jimenez

J.A.W. McCarthy is the author of Sometimes We’re Cruel and Other Stories (Cemetery Gates Media, 2021). Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Vastarien, LampLight, Apparition Lit, Tales to Terrify, and The Best Horror of the Year Vol 13 (ed. Ellen Datlow). She is Thai American and lives with her husband and assistant cats in the Pacific Northwest. You can call her Jen on Twitter @JAWMcCarthy, and find out more at www.jawmccarthy.com.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito

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Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito is a Chinese American writer, judge, and mother based in Portland, Oregon. When she’s not spending time with her family outdoors, she’s crafting short stories in horror, sci-fi, fantasy, or whatever genre-bending she can get away with. Her work can be found in Nailed Magazine, Red Penguin’s Collections, Buckman Journal’s Issue 006, Flame Tree Press’s Asian Ghost Stories, Strangehouse’s Chromophobia, Moms Who Write’s Order of Us, and Death’s Garden Revisited. www.francesippolito.com.

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Yi Izzy Yu

In 2011, Yi Izzy Yu left Northern China for the US. Since then, she has taught Chinese and English in high schools and colleges, given birth to the now eight-year-old visual artist Frankie Lu Branscum, and published work in magazines ranging from New England Review to Samovar and in the collections of translated Chinese weird fiction: The Shadow Book of Ji Yun and Zhiguai. Currently, she lives outside of Pittsburgh, where she teaches and translates Chinese and investigates shadows. What inspired you to start writing? I love language. Always have. At the end of my undergraduate studies in China, for example, I spent six months in the…

Jewish Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Josh Malerman

JOSH MALERMAN is the New York Times best selling author of Bird Box and Daphne. He’s also one of two singer/songwriters for the band The High Strung. He lives in Michigan with his fiancée, the artist and musician, Allison Laakko. What inspired you to start writing? It’s been there forever. The draw to writing. I tried a novel in fifth grade. Still bothers me I didn’t finish it. Yet, it still took me till age 29 to finish my first. Before then: quasi comic books, stabs at short stories, and wholly earnest attempts at novels, none of which I finished.…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Tori Eldridge

Tori Eldridge is the SCIBA national bestselling author and Anthony, Lefty, and Macavity Awards finalist of the Lily Wong mystery thriller series—THE NINJA DAUGHTER, THE NINJA’S BLADE, and THE NINJA BETRAYED. Her shorter works appear in the inaugural reboot of WEIRD TALES magazine and horror, dystopian, and other literary anthologies. Her horror screenplay THE GIFT—which inspired DANCE AMONG THE FLAMES—earned a semi-finalist spot for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. Before writing, Tori performed as an actress, singer, dancer on Broadway, television, and film, and earned a 5th degree black belt in To-Shin Do ninja martial arts. She is of Hawaiian, Chinese,…