Women in Horror: Interview with Becky Spratford

Becky Spratford trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She writes book reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of three books, most recently, The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition [ALA Editions, 2021]. She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association and currently serves as the Association’s Secretary and organizer of their annual Librarians’ Day. You can follow Becky on Twitter @RAforAll. What inspired you to start writing? As long as I can remember…

Women in Horror: Interview with EV Knight

EV Knight is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning debut novel The Fourth Whore. She released her sophomore novel Children of Demeter as well as a novella, Partum in 2021. EV lives in one of America’s most haunted cities—Savannah, Ga. She is a huge fan of the Savannah Bananas and the beauty of Bonaventure Cemetery. When not out and about searching for the ghosts of the past, EV can be found at home with her husband Matt, her beloved Chinese Crested Gozer Augustus, and their three naughty sphynx cats. What inspired you to start writing? I found horror as…

Women in Horror: Interview with Geneve Flynn

Geneve Flynn is an award-winning fiction editor and author. Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, which she co-edited with Lee Murray, won the 2020 Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards and shortlisted for the British Fantasy, Aurealis, and Australian Shadows awards. Geneve’s short stories have been published in various markets, including Flame Tree Publishing, PseudoPod, Crystal Lake Publishing & Black Spot Books, and Things in the Well. Her poetry appears in Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken, a Bram Stoker Award-nominated collaboration with Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Lee Murray, and she has been nominated for both the Rhysling and…

Women in Horror: Interview with Jessica McHugh

Jessica McHugh is a novelist, poet, and internationally-produced playwright running amok in the fields of horror, sci-fi, young adult, and wherever else her peculiar mind leads. She's had twenty-five books published in thirteen years, including her bizarro romp, "The Green Kangaroos," her YA series, "The Darla Decker Diaries," and her Bram Stoker Award-Nominated blackout poetry collection, "A Complex Accident of Life." For more info about publications and blackout poetry commissions, please visit McHughniverse.com. Strange Nests at Apokrupha: https://apokrupha.com/product/strange-nests/ Strange Nests ebook/print at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Nests-Jessica-McHugh-ebook/dp/B09BBKQZSH IG/Twitter/TikTok: theJessMcHugh What inspired you to start writing? Reading! As a voracious reader of pretty much every genre since I…

Women in Horror: Interview with Gwendolyn Kiste

Gwendolyn Kiste is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Invention of Ghosts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor's Nightfire, Black Static, The Dark, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com What inspired you to start writing? It feels like I’ve always been writing. I’ve been telling stories in…

Women in Horror: Interview with Brianna Malotke

Brianna Malotke is a freelance writer and member of the Horror Writers Association. Some of her most recent work can be found online at The Crypt, Witch House Amateur Magazine, and Sirens Call Publications. She has poetry in The Spectre Review and The Nottingham Horror Collective. She has work in the anthologies Beneath, Cosmos, The Deep, Beautiful Tragedies 2, and The Dire Circle. In April 2022 her poetry was included in the Women in Horror Poetry Showcase, Under Her Skin, published by Black Spot Books. In 2023 she will be a “Writer in Residence” at the Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. What inspired you to start writing? I had a wild childhood imagination and…

Women in Horror: Interview with Linda D. Addison

Linda D. Addison, the author of five award-winning collections, including The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti, & How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Her site:  www.LindaAddisonWriter.com. What inspired you to start writing? From the first time that I saw a book and realized it was a story that someone made up I knew I wanted to do the same thing. I had an active imagination and all my daydreaming involved things that weren't quite real: things with wings that weren't birds,…

Women in Horror: Interview with Bridget Nelson

Once an operating room registered nurse, Bridgett Nelson so enjoyed playing with human organs, she decided to turn her macabre interest into a horror writing career. She loves bubble baths (because nothing says spooooky writer like orange-scented bubbles), hates not knowing what’s swimming in the water with her, lives for Halloween season (but loathes chainsaw-wielding dudes in haunted houses), adores her West Virginia University Mountaineers, is very pro-Oxford comma, and thinks bananas are absolutely disgusting. Bridgett has contributed to multiple anthologies and her debut collection, A BOUQUET OF VISCERA, is coming soon! More tidbits! Bridgett is a(n)… HWA: WV Chapter…

Women in Horror: Interview with Candice Nola

Candace Nola is a Pittsburgh author with 3 published novels currently on Amazon. Breach was her debut novel, published in November 2019, followed by Beyond the Breach, published December 22, 2020. Her third novel, Hank Flynn, was published in July of 2021.  She also had a short story published in the Secondhand Creeps anthology in May of 2021, that she co-authored with Sam Hill of the U.K. She is a new member of the Horror Authors Guild and recently joined The House of Stitched magazine as an editor and writer. She began her horror website in January of 2020 to…

Women in Horror: Interview with Mercedes M. Yardley

Mercedes M. Yardley is a dark fantasist who wears red lipstick and poisonous flowers in her hair. She is the author of Beautiful Sorrows, the Stabby Award-winning Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, Pretty Little Dead Girls, and Nameless. She won the Bram Stoker Award for her story Little Dead Red and was a Bram Stoker Award nominee for her short story “Loving You Darkly” and the Arterial Bloom anthology. Mercedes lives and works in Las Vegas with her family and strange menagerie. You can find her at mercedesmyardley.com. What inspired you to start writing? I always wrote, but I needed to give myself permission to…

Women in Horror: Interview with Cynthia Pelayo

Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo is an International Latino Book Award-winning and two-time Bram Stoker Awards® nominated poet and author. She is the author of LOTERIA, SANTA MUERTE, THE MISSING, and POEMS OF MY NIGHT, all of which have been nominated for International Latino Book Awards. POEMS OF MY NIGHT was also nominated for an Elgin Award. Her recent collection of poetry, INTO THE FOREST AND ALL THE WAY THROUGH explores true crime, that of the epidemic of missing and murdered women in the United States, and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and Elgin Award. Her modern-day horror retelling of…

Women in Horror: Interview with Ellen Datlow

Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for four decades. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com and Nightfire. She has edited numerous anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year annual series, Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles. Forthcoming are When Things Get Dark: Stories inspired by Shirley Jackson and the reprint anthology Body Shocks. Her next original anthology is Screams From the Dark: 19 Tales of Monsters and the…

Women in Horror: 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 or at www.rhondajacksonjoseph.com Thank you so much for chatting with me today!  What inspired you to start writing? I think I sprang…

Women in Horror: Interview with Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Uchinanchu-American and an award-winning poet, author, and publisher with over 20 years of experience in newspaper journalism. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), a Bram Stoker Awards® Finalist and HWA Mentor of the Year for 2020, she offers free classes for writers at angelaysmith.com. What inspired you to start writing? This is always a hard question for me. I don’t remember a time when words weren’t really important to me. My mom taught me to read before Kindergarten. I loved Ranger Rick magazine and any other thing with words. This included pieces…

Women in Horror: Interview with Patricia Gomes

Poet Laureate of New Bedford, Massachusetts from 2014 to 2021, author and playwright Patricia Gomes is published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including the New England Horror Writers Anthologies, Wicked Women and Wicked Creatures. A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2008, 2018 and 2021, and twice nominated for a Rhysling Science Fiction award, Gomes is the author of four chapbooks. Ms. Gomes recent publications include Tidings, Star*Line, Muddy River Review, Motif Magazine, Alien Buddha Press, and Apex and Abyss. Ms. Gomes is the co-founder of the GNB Writers Block as well a member of the Massachusetts Poetry Society, the SciFi Poetry Association, New England Horror Writers, the Horror Writers…

Women in Horror: Interview with Carina Bissett

Carina Bissett is a writer, poet, and educator working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in multiple journals and anthologies including Upon a Twice Time, Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales, Arterial Bloom, Gorgon: Stories of Emergence, Weird Dream Society, Hath No Fury, and the HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. V, VI, and VIII. She has also written stories set in shared worlds for RPGs at Green Ronin Publishing and Onyx Path Publishing. In addition to writing, she has edited several projects; the most recent is in the role as co-editor for Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas. Bissett…

Women in Horror: Interview with Alexandrea Weis

Alexandrea Weis, RN-CS, PhD, is a multi-award-winning author, screenwriter, advanced practice registered nurse, and historian who was born and raised in the French Quarter of New Orleans. She has taught at major universities and worked in nursing for thirty years, dealing with victims of sexual assault, abuse, and mental illness in a clinical setting at many New Orleans area hospitals. Having grown up in the motion picture industry as the daughter of a director, she learned to tell stories from a different perspective. Infusing the rich tapestry of her hometown into her novels, she believes that creating vivid characters makes…

Women in Horror: Interview with Donna Lynch

Donna Lynch is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated dark fiction writer, designer, spoken word artist, and the singer and co-founder—along with her husband, artist and musician Steven Archer—of the dark electro-rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records). Her written works include Isabel Burning, Red Horses, Driving Through the Desert; and the poetry collections In My Mouth, Ladies & Other Vicious Creatures, Daughters of Lilith, Witches, and Choking Back the Devil, among others. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and the winner of the 2019 Ladies of Horror Fiction Awards for Best Poetry Collection—Choking Back the Devil (Raw…

Women in Horror: Interview with Sara Tantlinger

Sara Tantlinger is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes, and the Stoker-nominated works To Be Devoured, Cradleland of Parasites, and Not All Monsters. Along with being a mentor for the HWA Mentorship Program, she is also a co-organizer for the HWA Pittsburgh Chapter. She embraces all things macabre and can be found lurking in graveyards or on Twitter @SaraTantlinger, at saratantlinger.com, and on Instagram @inkychaotics What inspired you to start writing? Poetry! I loved writing lyrics and poetry for as long as I can remember. Luckily, I think I burned all…

Women in Horror: Interview with Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include Night Terrors & Other Tales, Weird Women 2 (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances; her latest short stories appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2020, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and In League with…