Maafa Day is a Pan-African observance. It is a day of remembrance where we hold space for the millions of Africans who lost their lives due to the TransAtlantic slave trade. That includes those who died on slave ships while being forcibly transferred to the Americas, those who died during escape attempts, and those who died in captivity. Maafa comes from the Kiswahili (Swahili) term for “disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy”.and is used to refer to the African Holocaust. Maafa Day also serves the purpose of making sure that we never forget Maafa – the African Holocaust. This year …

Jacqueline Dyre (they/them) is the editor and publisher of Novel Noctule, as well as a 2020 HWA Diversity Grant recipient. You can find them in the sunshine state, drinking poorly made coffee and consuming psychological horror in lieu of meals.

What inspired you to start publishing and editing?

When I founded Novel Noctule, I was recovering from acute myeloid leukemia and an allogeneic stem cell transplant. In my estimation, second chances are much better motivators than first chances: If you’re on your second chance, chances are that you’ve almost lost something, and you’re now being forced to consider …

Norman Prentiss is the author of Odd Adventures with your Other Father, Life in a Haunted House, and The Apocalypse-a-Day Desk Calendar. He won a Bram Stoker Award for his first book, Invisible Fences. Other publications include The Book of Baby Names, Four Legs in the Morning, The Fleshless Man, The Halloween Children (with Brian James Freeman) and The Narrator (with Michael McBride), with story appearances in Dark Screams, Postscripts, Black Static, Four Halloweens, Blood Lite 3, Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best …

Thommy Hutson is an award-winning screenwriter, producer, director, and best-selling author. A graduate of UCLA, he has written or produced critically acclaimed film and television projects—horror, thriller, holiday, animation, and documentary—that have aired on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Hallmark, Lifetime, Syfy, Bio Channel, and more. His award-winning debut novel is the teen thriller Jinxed. A member of the Producers Guild of America, Horror Writers Association, and a Saturn and Home Media Magazine award-winner, Thommy is an aficionado of horror and teen movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s, as well as a lover of Christmas films. He continues to …

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 far too much sugar. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner, and their two small cat children. She has been published in the Bram Stoker winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, The Dark, and Rocket Kapre. You can find her on @layangabi on Twitter and on Facebook.…

Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth (Riverhead Books, 2021) and the NYT bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Fiction, has been a columnist for Literary Hub, and was a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, North American Review, The Normal School…

Daniel M. Lavery is the author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You. He also writes The Chatner, a weekly newsletter about literature, humor, and pop culture.

What inspired you to start writing?
I really do think it’s as simple as I’ve always wanted to, and I’ve always enjoyed it.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
I think it might have been mass-market covers, honestly – I remember being really struck by the often really lurid covers for everything from Christopher Pike to Shirley Jackson when I was a kid browsing …

Larissa Glasser is a librarian-archivist from New England. She writes dark fiction centered on the lives of trans women, library science, and heavy metal. Her work is available in Transcendent 3: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press) and Tragedy Queens: stories inspired by Lana Del Rey and Sylvia Plath (Clash Books). Her debut novella F4 is available from Eraserhead Press. She is on Twitter @larissaeglasser

What inspired you to start writing?

I was more of a TV baby than a reader when I was little. The year after my dad died, I …