Nuts & Bolts: Actor, Writer, Director Nyasha Hatendi

Nuts & Bolts: Actor, Writer, Director Nyasha Hatendi

By Tom Joyce -- Accomplished actor Nyasha Hatendi knew that Black narratives had a place in the mainstream. He also knew he could craft a tale specifically for Black audiences that would have universal appeal, because a good story is a good story. It was a matter of finding the right medium. The result is “Sacrilege: Curse of the Mbirwi,” an original audio horror/drama that Nyasha created for Audible. Caleb McLaughlin of “Stranger Things” stars in the Afrocentric deconstruction of a classic horror set-up, where family members return to their ancestral homeland and awaken something evil – a monster emerging…

The Seers’ Table August 2025

Kari J. Wolfe, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community   You can see any of The Seers' Table posts since inception (March 2016) by going to the HWA main page and selecting the menu item “HWA Publications / Blogs / Seers’ Table”.   Kari J. Wolfe recommends:   Katherine Silva is an ace Maine horror author, a connoisseur of coffee, and victim of cat shenanigans. Her favorite flavors of the genre mix grief and existentialism which she combines with her love of the New England wilderness in her works. She is a three-time Maine Literary Award finalist for speculative…

The Seers’ Table July 2025

Linda D. Addison, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community   You can see any of The Seers' Table posts since inception (March 2016) by going to the HWA main page and selecting the menu item “HWA Publications / Blogs / Seers’ Table”.   Kate Maruyama recommends:   Catherine Kuo is an Asian American writer who lived and worked in Taiwan and Japan for several years before returning to the United States. She graduated from the University of California, Davis, where she was selected as one of the winners of the university’s 2010-2011 “Prized Writing” competition. She is an HWA member…
HWA 2025 Election Candidates

HWA 2025 Election Candidates

  The HWA’s annual elections will soon be upon us. Up this year are four Trustee positions, as well as the offices of Vice President and Treasurer. Please read the statements of the following candidates carefully. Links to the ballot will be sent out on or around September 9th, 2025 to our Active and Lifetime members, with a due date of September 16th, 2025.  The elected officers shall hold their respective offices for terms of two years, beginning on November 1 and ending on October 31.   Candidates for 2025 Elections All candidates have been verified as active members and eligible…
HWA Mourns the Loss of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

HWA Mourns the Loss of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  The Horror Writers Association mourns the loss of a foundational pillar not only for her contributions to the organization, but for her legacy. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro served as the HWA’s third president, and in the words of former HWA President, Lisa Morton, “as HWA's first female President - at a time when women were still scarce in the genre - she blazed the trail that all of us who came later would follow, a trail she made clear with authority, wisdom, and grace. Like her character Saint Germain, she is a true immortal." Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (September 15, 1942…
HWA Update on the LibGen AI Litigation

HWA Update on the LibGen AI Litigation

  We have an important update on the ongoing copyright class-action lawsuit involving the exploitation of authors’ works. The court has found that Anthropic infringed on authors’ and publishers’ copyrights by downloading millions of books from the pirate websites Library Genesis (“LibGen”) and Pirate Library Mirror (“PiLiMi”) to train its AI model. A certified class has been established, made up of rights holders whose copyright-registered books were downloaded from these sites by Anthropic. Here is a link to a searchable database of titles in the LibGen collection. This database includes both traditionally published and independently published works. The plaintiffs’ attorneys are…
Nuts & Bolts: Grady Hendrix, Chris Poggiali on the Martial Arts Film Boom, Lessons for Horror Writers

Nuts & Bolts: Grady Hendrix, Chris Poggiali on the Martial Arts Film Boom, Lessons for Horror Writers

By Tom Joyce -- Martial arts, like horror, was one of the genres that grabbed the film industry by the grindhouses in the 1970s and changed pop culture history forever. In their lavishly illustrated new book These Fists Break Bricks, Grady Hendrix and Chris Poggiali tell the story of the martial arts film boom, and the international coalition of performers, filmmakers, distributors, theater owners, and promoters who made it happen. In his foreword, rapper, producer, and filmmaker RZA describes how the movies inspired young people like him in those troubled years, and brought them a multicultural and gender-inclusive perspective. According…
API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Jessica Gleason

API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Jessica Gleason

    What is your novel about?  Easy Bake Covenant is personal for me. I poured a lot of myself into the MC, Laura. At its heart, Easy Bake Covenant is a story about a little girl working through her demons, both literal and metaphorical. She’s gifted a peculiar Easy Bake Oven and, through it, she unwittingly makes a deal with the devil. She’s lost and angry, but grabs her power back and uses it to become strong and independent. To be clear, it’s not a fairy tale. Laura is fierce and funny, and her happy ending may not be…
API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Kelsea Yu

API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Kelsea Yu

  What is your novella about? My next book, Demon Song (out from Titan Books on September 30), is a modern gothic horror novella inspired by The Phantom of the Opera. The main character, Megan, is a Chinese American teenager who—along with her mom—is on the run from an abusive man. They seek refuge in an ancient Beijing opera house. There, Megan finds a Chinese mythology book and begins reading the tale of Baigujing, the White Bone Demon. Soon, myths begin to bleed into her life as dreams and reality blur, and Megan must discover the true, horrifying secret of…
API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Geneve Flynn

API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Geneve Flynn

  What is your story about? “If I Am to Earn My Tether” is a horror short story about sand piracy, colonialism, and living with the choices our ancestors made. It features the Malaysian myth of the polong, a tiny homunculus born from the blood of a murder victim, and her pet grasshopper, the pelesit. It was published in Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora by Bad Hand Books in May this year. The collection is edited by Kristy Park Kulski and includes short fiction and poetry by Ai Jiang, Nadia Bulkin, Christina Sng,…
An Introduction to API/AANHPI Month by Frances Lu Pai Ippolito

An Introduction to API/AANHPI Month by Frances Lu Pai Ippolito

  The first thing I think of when I sit down to write this introduction is a well. It’s a deep one, made of chipped stone blocks in the courtyard of an abandoned house somewhere between Anhui and Guangdong in the late 1930s. My 7-year-old grandmother is hiding in an empty residence with the women of her family – her mother, Popo, Nai Nai, and her 5-year-old sister. Her brother and father are missing, and the oldest sisters fled their Anhui home weeks ago with neighbors. The well is important because that is where my grandmother encounters her first ghost.…
Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Abigail F. Taylor

Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Abigail F. Taylor

  What is your novel about? Maryneal, 1962, is American Werewolf in London meets American Graffiti… With the full moon approaching and no salvation in sight, Delah is faced with an unconscionable decision: If she can’t find a cure, she’ll have to kill the boy next door. Despite its monsters and all things that go bump in the night, at its core, Maryneal is about grief and how concealing identities can devour us. Delah is learning how to navigate her sexuality with an unexpected crush developing on one of her girlfriends, and it hits her at the worst possible time:…
Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Newton Webb

Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Newton Webb

  What is your book about? My books explore the horrors humans inflict on one another, cannibalism, gaslighting, serial killers, and mad science. I’ve published fifteen books now. Even though I include supernatural creatures and cryptids in many of my stories, I always focus on the human element. Beneath the gore and the ghosts, there is a consistent theme: power, the abuse of it, and what happens when ordinary people are pushed too far. I write my stories to unsettle, to provoke, and to tell my personal truth through the lens of horror. I’ve written nearly a hundred short stories…
Nuts & Bolts: Gregory Frost on Writing Historically Based Fiction

Nuts & Bolts: Gregory Frost on Writing Historically Based Fiction

By Tom Joyce When tackling historically based fiction, how do you split the workload between research and writing time? How do you please both casual readers and history buffs? Author Gregory Frost recently had to face those challenges three times in rapid succession with his time-hopping horror/science fiction Rhymer series. His latest is a “haunted White House” novel titled The Secret House, out this month. For the latest installment of Nuts & Bolts, Gregory shares advice on doing research and mining historical fact for genre fiction. Q: Can you talk a little bit about how the idea for “The Secret…
StokerCon 2025 Keynote Speech: Why We Need Horror Authors in the Fight For the Freedom to Read

StokerCon 2025 Keynote Speech: Why We Need Horror Authors in the Fight For the Freedom to Read

  On June 14th in Stamford, Connecticut, Becky Spratford gave the keynote speech at StokerCon 2025. You can watch the entire awards on YouTube, and you can see her keynote speech HERE. Why We Need Horror Authors in the Fight For the Freedom to Read Hello. As many of you know, my name is Becky Spratford and I am the Secretary of the Horror Writers Association and the Co-Chair (with Konrad Stump) of our Libraries Committee. I have been a librarian for 25 years–the entirety of this century–and I don’t think this will shock any of you, but the last five…
2024 Bram Stoker Award Winners Announced

2024 Bram Stoker Award Winners Announced

  The Horror Writers Association is proud to announce the winners of the 2024 Bram Stoker Awards®.   Superior Achievement in a Novel WINNER: The Haunting of Velkwood, Gwendolyn Kiste (Saga) House of Bone and Rain, Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland) I Was a Teenage Slasher, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga) Incidents Around the House, Josh Malerman (Del Rey) Horror Movie, Paul Tremblay (William Morrow)   Superior Achievement in a First Novel WINNER: The Eyes Are the Best Part, Monika Kim (Erewhon) Midnight Rooms, Donyae Coles (Amistad) Hollow Girls, Jessica Drake-Thomas (Cemetery Dance) This Wretched Valley, Jenny Kiefer (Quirk) Bless Your Heart, Lindy Ryan (Minotaur…
StokerCon 2026 Announced – Celebrating Ten Years of StokerCon!

StokerCon 2026 Announced – Celebrating Ten Years of StokerCon!

The Horror Writers Association is pleased to announce StokerCon 2026 which will be StokerCon 10. This is a milestone for us to celebrate an occasion to look back on the history of the convention and how it has grown and flourished through the decade.  It is also a moment to think ahead and look to 2027 where we recognize 40 years of the HWA. So taking a page from our history and the years before StokerCon, we will be inviting you to join us in the same location for both 2026 and 2027 - a place that is dedicated to preserving…
Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Mia Dalia

Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Mia Dalia

  What is your novel about? My novel, Haven, is about a family who stays at an inherited house for a month of August. And all the things that go terribly wrong. So, on the surface, it’s a “dream vacation turns nightmare” story, but there’s a lot more to it. Both the novel and the house have a backstory of a woman wronged and determined to rise above. But a terrible injustice calls for a revenge in whatever way it finds it, and the past never truly stops bleeding into the present. Haven is far from an idyllic lake house,…
Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Briana Morgan

Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Briana Morgan

  What is your novel about? I write psychological, character-driven horror featuring ghosts, demons, monsters, and the scariest thing of all—the dark side of humanity. So far, I’ve written books and plays that run the gamut from queer vampires to killer mermaids and influencer horror. What are you looking to express to readers with your work? More than anything, I want readers to feel seen. I want them to see how even flawed characters can do great things. As a queer, neurodivergent, disabled author, I haven’t often seen myself represented in books. I’d like to change that for my readers.…
Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Nico Bell

Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Nico Bell

  What is your novel about? Static Screams is a sci-fi horror about a young woman seeking a cure to her terrifying hallucinations. Carmen Franco’s untethered mind twists reality into a nightmare filled with relentless hallucinations. Carmen’s greatest desire is a peaceful life, but despite countless doctors and swallowing a pharmacy’s worth of pills, Carmen can’t escape her disturbing delusions brought forth from a past tragedy. Enter Dr. Barbara MacDonald, a brilliant psychologist proposing an innovative and experimental treatment program. Barbara ignites a flicker of hope, but Carmen quickly realizes the doctor’s motives aren’t exactly pure. Carmen holds the key…