Women in Horror: Interview with Nancy Holder

Nancy Holder is a New York Times bestselling author and recipient of six Bram Stoker Awards. In 2019 she was named a Grand Master by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. She has served HWA as vice president and a member of the board of trustees. She and her co-writer Alan Philipson are writing comic book series for Moonstone and IFG, as well as a short story for the 50th-anniversary celebration of Kolchak the Night Stalker. Her most recent solo publication is “Chickens for Chompy,” a short story in the forthcoming Diablo House anthology from Clover Press. What inspired you to start writing? My…

Women in Horror: Interview with Marge Simon

Marge Simon lives in Ocala, FL, City of Trees with her husband, poet/writer Bruce Boston and the ghosts of two cats. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side. Marge’s works have appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Asimov’s, Crannog, Silver Blade. New Myths, Daily Science Fiction, more. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest poet/writer and is a founding member of the Speculative Literary Foundation. A multiple Bram Stoker award winner, Marge is the second woman to be acknowledged by the SF &F Poetry Association with a Grand Master Award. She received…

Women in Horror: Interview with Lee Murray

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 debut 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, a collaboration with Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng, and Geneve Flynn was released in October 2021.   What inspired you to start writing?…

The Seers’ Table March 2022

Kate Maruyama, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community   Rob Costello introduces: Author Photo Credit: Melanie Elise Photography LLC . Aden Polydoros is a queer, Jewish writer of speculative fiction for young readers. He grew up in Illinois and Arizona, and has a bachelor’s degree in English from Northern Arizona University. He is the author of several books for young readers, including the forthcoming Bone Weaver (Fall 2022) and The Ring of Solomon (Winter 2023). He has also contributed to the upcoming YA anthology The Gathering Dark, An Anthology of Folk Horror, edited by Tori Bovalino (Fall 2022). Aden’s current YA release, The City Beautiful, which is on…

Women in Horror: Interview with Cassondra Windwalker

Cassondra Windwalker is the author of the new gothic horror Hold My Place. She has three other published novels, two full-length poetry collections, and a melange of short-form works in literary magazines, anthologies, and art books. She's lived in the South, the Midwest, and the West, and presently writes full-time from the Frozen North. She keeps company mostly with ghosts, literary characters, unwary wild animals, and her tolerant husband.   What inspired you to start writing? I don’t know that I ever started writing. My earliest memories are of me narrating the world in my head, my mom telling me…

Women in Horror Month Interview Series: Introduction by Lindy Ryan

Women in Horror Month HWA Interview Series: Introduction by Lindy Ryan From literature to film and everywhere between, Women in Horror Month (WiHM) celebrates and amplifies the contributions of women in the genre. This annual event embraces all those in horror who identify as women—championing a special sisterhood amongst women who shine brightest in the dark. Though historically underrepresented and oft-ignored, from Mary Shelley’s creation of Frankenstein—one of the most lasting and reanimated icons of the genre—women have always been at the heart of horror. We have been victims and tropes, Final Girls and Pretty Dead Girls, and caricatures by…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Jamal Hodge

Jamal Hodge is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and writer who is a sitting Board Member of Harlem Film House and Axs Lab. Hodge is an active member of The Horror Writer's Association and The SFPA, being nominated for a 2021 Rhysling Award for his Poem 'Fermi's Spaceship' and a 2022 Rhysling Award for his poem 'Loving Venus'. While his poem 'The Silence of God' placed in the 2021 Horror Writer Association Showcase. His Poetry is Featured in the Anthology Chiral Mad 5 alongside such legends as Stephen King, Langston Hughes, Linda Addison & Josh Malerman. Jamal's screenplay 'Mourning Meal' won 5…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Nikki Woolfolk

A latchkey kid of film noir, cozy mysteries, and gritty detective novels, Nikki Woolfolk writes humorous mysteries with a bite. What inspired you to start writing? I wanted to travel the world, but my family didn’t travel during my childhood besides occasional visits to grandparents. So, I created stories as a means to research places I wanted to visit and all it cost me was paper, pencils, and a library card. I needed to write about my grief of a loss that happened when I was kid. I wrote horror, a revenge piece that allowed me to speak loudly about…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Rhonda Jackson Garcia

Rhonda Jackson Garcia, AKA RJ Joseph, is a Stoker Award™ nominated, Texas based academic and creative writer/professor whose writing regularly focuses on the intersections of gender and race in the horror and romance genres and popular culture. She has had works published in various applauded venues, including the 2020 Halloween issue of Southwest Review and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Series. Rhonda is also an instructor at the Speculative Fiction academy. She occasionally peeks out on Twitter @rjacksonjoseph. What inspired you to start writing? I grew up in a reading household where everyone read, all the time. My mother…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Valjeanne Jeffers

Valjeanne Jeffers is a speculative fiction author, screenwriter, a Spelman College graduate, a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective (CAAWC) and the Horror Writers Association (HWA). She is the author of ten books, including her Immortal series and her most recent Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective series. She also co-edited the erotic speculative fiction anthologies, Scierogenous: An Anthology of Erotic Science Fiction and Fantasy Volumes I and II (with Quinton Veal). Her writing has been published in numerous anthologies including: The City: A Cyberfunk Anthology; Steamfunk!; Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler (winner of the Locus Award, nominated…

The 2021 Bram Stoker Awards® Final Ballot Announced

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) is pleased to announce the Final Ballot for the 2021 Bram Stoker Awards®. The HWA (see http://www.horror.org/) is the premiere writers' organization in the horror and dark fiction genre, with more than 1,800 members. We have presented the Bram Stoker Awards in various categories since 1987 (see http://www.thebramstokerawards.com/) Works appearing on this Ballot are Bram Stoker Award® Nominees for Superior Achievement in their Category, e.g., Novel, and everyone may refer to them as such immediately after the announcement. The HWA Board and the Bram Stoker Awards® Committee congratulate all those appearing on the Final Ballot. Notes…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Chesya Burke

Chesya Burke is an Asst. Professor of English and U.S. Literatures at Stetson University. Having written and published over a hundred fiction pieces and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, comics and horror, her academic research focuses primarily on the intersections of race, gender and genre. Her primary areas of study are in African American literature, race and gender studies, comics and speculative fiction. Chesya received her Master’s degree in African American Studies from Georgia State University, and she wrote several articles for the African American National Biography published by Harvard and Oxford University Press. Burke is the…
HWA Members New Releases – 2022

HWA Members New Releases – 2022

Welcome to the showcase of new releases! Select a book cover to purchase or learn more about it or the author. You can view the wall of amazing cover art from past years by using the dropdown in the menu above. And members, please sign into the members-only area to submit upcoming releases. Thank you! .

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Linda D. Addison

Linda D. Addison is an award-winning author of five collections, including The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti, & How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, and the first African-American recipient of the HWA Bram Stoker Award®. She is a recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, HWA Mentor of the Year and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Addison has published over 380 poems, stories and articles and is a member of CITH, HWA, SFWA and SFPA. She is a co-editor of Sycorax’s Daughters, an anthology of horror fiction/poetry by African-American women. Catch her work…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Sumiko Saulson

Sumiko Saulson is an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror. They are the editor of the anthologies and collections Black Magic Women, Scry of Lust, Black Celebration, and Wickedly Abled. Ze is the winner of the 2016 HWA StokerCon "Scholarship from Hell", 2017 BCC Voice "Reframing the Other" contest, 2017 Mixy Award, 2018 AWW "Afrosurrealist Writer Award," 2020 HWA Diversity Grant recipient.  They have an AA in English from Berkeley City College, and write a column called "Writing While Black" for a national Black Newspaper, the San Francisco BayView, are the host of the SOMA Leather and LGBT Cultural District's "Erotic Storytelling Hour." and the Social…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Steven Van Patten

Steven Van Patten is the author of the celebrated Brookwater’s Curse vampire trilogy, and the Killer Genius serial killer series. He’s also co-author of Hell at The Way Station, which won Best Anthology and Best in Science Fiction at the 2019 African American Literary Awards. Numerous short stories have been published in over a dozen anthologies and he’s a contributing writer/consultant for the YouTube channel Extra History as well as the Viral Vignettes series. He’s a member of the New York Chapter of The Horror Writer’s Association, The Director’s Guild of America, and professional arts fraternity Gamma Xi Phi Incorporated.…

Summer Scares Reading List 2022

In celebration of National Library Lover’s Day, the Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with United for Libraries, Book Riot, and Booklist, is delighted to announce the fourth annual Summer Scares reading list, which includes titles selected by a panel of authors and librarians and is designed to promote Horror as a great reading option for all ages and during any time of the year. Every year, three titles are selected in each of three categories: Adult, Young Adult, and Middle Grade. For 2022 the selected titles are: ADULT Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias [Broken River Books, 2018] My Favorite…

Black Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Tananarive Due

TANANARIVE DUE (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote "A Small Town" for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s "The Twilight Zone" on Paramount Plus, and two segments of Shudder’s anthology film Horror Noire. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies.…