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 the possibility…

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 Four Legs in the Morning, The Halloween Children (with The Narrator (with Dark Screams, normanprentiss.com. What inspired you to start publishing and editing? I was reading Edgar Allan Poe in grade school, and I got there through my love of horror movies broadcast on TV. I was reading horror comics at the same time, like House of Mystery and House of Secrets, then…

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 develop unique and…

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. What inspired you to start writing? I’ve…

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, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review,…

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 the library…

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 saw the original cartoon version…

Ally Wilkes is a queer writer living in Greenwich, London. Ally’s debut novel, All the White Spaces – a supernatural survival horror set in the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration – will be out in March 2022. Ally is also Book Reviews Editor for Horrified, the British horror website, and you can follow her on Twitter @UnheimlichManvr. The t-shirt in her photo can be found at HorrorOasis.com. All proceeds will go to Trans Lifeline, available at 877-565-8860 in the US and 877-330-6366 in Canada. The organization describes itself as "a grassroots hotline and microgrants 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offering direct emotional…

Proud Blerd, Nikki Woolfolk sculpts decadent desserts and fantastical fiction with equal skill and flair. When they're not playing a never-ending game of “what if” in a writing space that’s part DieselPunk, part Willy Wonka, they are drawing on their former STEM career and collection of quirky experiences to work up new recipes in the kitchen (tasting encouraged), designing a Goth-inspired garden (tasting decidedly DISCOURAGED), and mashing up real and fictional worlds on social media (virtual kitchen table is always open). Join their cogged-and-geared world at NikkiWoolfolk.com What inspired you to start writing? Culturally I grew up in a household…

A New York Times bestseller since his first publication at the age of twenty-two, Christopher Rice is the author of Bone Music (an Amazon Charts bestseller and the first novel in the Burning Girl series) and its sequel, Blood Echo, as well as the Bram Stoker finalists The Heavens Rise and The Vines. Blood Victory, his third Burning Girl novel released in August 2020. He is an executive producer on the television adaptations of The Vampire Chronicles and The Lives of the Mayfair Witches by Anne Rice for AMC Studios, and he also collaborated with her on Ramses The Damned:…

Billy Martin, writing as Poppy Z. Brite, has published several novels and story collections including Lost Souls, Exquisite Corpse, and Liquor. Martin lives in New Orleans with his husband, the artist Grey Cross. He is working on a nonfiction book about religion and spirituality in the fiction of Stephen King. Support him on Patreon at www.patreon.com/docbrite. What inspired you to start writing? I don't really have a memory of a time when I didn't do it. Even now, though I'm not currently writing/publishing fiction, I'm still making it up in my head. Most of it isn't any good, no coherent…

Rin Chupeco wrote obscure manuals for complicated computer programs, talked people out of their money at event shows, and did many other terrible things. They now write about ghosts and fairy tales but is still sometimes mistaken for a revenant. They were born and raised in the Philippines and, or so the legend goes, still haunts that place to this very day. They are the author of The Girl from the Well duology, The Bone Witch trilogy, The Never Tilting World duology, and the Hundred Names For Magic series, starting with Wicked As You Wish . Their short stories have…

Craig Laurance Gidney writes both contemporary and genre fiction. He is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013) and A Spectral Hue (Word Horde, 2019). He is a 3-time finalist for the Lamdba Literary Award and a finalist for the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. His website is craiglaurancegidney.com. Instagram and Twitter: ethereallad. What inspired you to start writing? I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was a child. I remember looking at all of the Newberry Award books (particularly…

Video Transcript: Hi, I’m Linda Addison, the Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant Chair. Hi, I’m Michelle Renee Lane and I write horror. Hi, I’m Steven Van Patten. I write scary stuff. Hi, I’m L Marie Wood. I’m Marc Abbott. I’m Sumiko Saulson, on the Social Media Team for the Horror Writers Association. Linda Addison: On behalf of the Horror Writers Association we’d like to congratulate all African Americans on the progress recently made towards making Juneteenth a federally recognized Black Liberation Holiday. Nikki Woolfolk: On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution establishing June 19 as Juneteenth, a National Black…

Eve Harms is a writer of freaky, fun, dark fiction who currently resides in Los Angeles with her children’s book illustrator wife and two cats. Her work has appeared in publications such as Vastarien Literary Journal, under Rayna Waxhead, and Creepy Catalog, under Kendra Temples. Her forthcoming transsexual body horror novella Transmuted is coming out July 15th, 2021 as a part of Unnerving's Rewind or Die series. She blogs regularly about occult and esoteric topics on her website at https://eveharms.com What inspired you to start writing? I’ve dabbled in just about every artistic medium you can think of throughout the…

Christina Delia is a horror writer from New Jersey, and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Her stories are included in the anthologies What Monsters Do for Love: Volume 3, Shadowy Natures, and most recently in Dark Dispatch and the LGBTQ+ dark fiction anthology Unburied. Christina has a story forthcoming in Planet Scumm. What inspired you to start writing? I was a very quiet child and I learned how to read late, but I always enjoyed hearing my mother read stories aloud to me. So when I learned how to write as a kid, the desire to…

Hailey Piper is the author of novellas The Worm and His Kings, winner of the 2020 Lesfic Award for Best Horror; Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and her collection Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy. Her debut novel, Queen of Teeth, releases from Strangehouse Books in summer 2021. She's an active member of the HWA, with short stories appearing in Year's Best Hardcore Horror, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, The Arcanist, and elsewhere. A trans woman hailing from New York's haunted woods, she now lives with her wife in Maryland. Find her on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays or at www.haileypiper.com. What…