A Point of Pride: Interview with Lee Mandelo

Lee Mandelo (he/him) is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. His debut novel Summer Sons, featured in publications ranging from NPR to the Chicago Review of Books, is a contemporary Southern Gothic dealing with queer masculinity, fast cars, and ugly inheritances. His most recent book, Feed Them Silence, is a near-future science fiction novella—and there's also a t4t historical Appalachian horror novella in the works. Mandelo has been a past nominee for awards including the Nebula, Lambda, and Hugo Awards, and is currently living in Louisville…

A Point of Pride: An Interview with Lor Gislason

Lor Gislason (they/he) is a non-binary homebody and the author of Inside Out. They are also the editor of Bound In Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror. Find them on Twitter @Lorelli_ and their blog lorgislason.wordpress.com What inspired you to start writing? During the early days of the Covid lockdowns, I lost my job and suddenly had a lot of free time. I decided to catch up on horror movies, fill in my blindspots for classics, and that kind of thing. I watched Daniel Isn’t Real and it stuck with me—I texted my friend “Why isn’t anyone writing about…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Andrew Robertson

Andrew Robertson is a queer horror writer and editor. He recently released a dual-author short story collection with Sèphera Girón, Dearly Departed, available from the Great Lakes Horror Company. The collection represents their favourite frights and gravest hits published over the past decade. Andrew has three short stories heading to the Moon as part of Lunar Codex. A project by Samuel Peralta, Lunar Codex is archiving the works of over 30,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers from 156 countries in tandem with NASA's Artemis program and the Writers on the Moon project. These stories will be part of the largest single…

A point of Pride: An Interview with Wendy N. Wagner

Wendy N. Wagner is a writer and Hugo award-winning editor. Her books include the forthcoming cosmic horror novel The Creek Girl (Tor Nightfire, 2025), The Deer Kings, The Secret Skin, and the Locus best-selling An Oath of Dogs. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in seventy-some publications, running the gamut from horror to environmental literature. She is also the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog. You can find her at winniewoohoo.com. What inspired you to…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Joe Koch

Joe Koch (He/They) writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Convulsive, and The Couvade, which received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination in 2019. His short fiction appears in publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Queer Book of Saints. Joe also co-edited the art-horror anthology Stories of the Eye. Find Joe online at their website and on Twitter.   What inspired you to start writing? Writing evolved from the same need that drove me to do visual art fifty years prior. I need to make things,…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Michael R. Collins

Michael R Collins was born at a very young age in the wilds of southern Idaho. After a few decades, he finally got his fill of all the sagebrush and rattlesnakes he could eat, so he struck out into the world. After slinging some bass guitar and general shenanigans in Austin, Texas, he currently lives in Pennsylvania with his partner Mel. He is a Bi author who has published four novels. His most recent novellas are Verum Malum, Miracles for Masochists (with James G. Carlson), and Dick Wiggler and Other Useless Superpowers (writing as Mick Collins) as well as penning…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Ruth Anna Evans

  Ruth Anna Evans is a writer, anthologizer, and cover designer who lives in the heart of all that is sinister: the American Midwest. She has been composing prose of all types since childhood but finds something truly delightful in putting her nightmares on the page. She has self-published the horror collection No One Can Help You: Tales of Lost Children and Other Nightmares, along with novellas, novelettes, and several short stories. She is the editor of Ooze: Little Bursts of Body Horror. Her work has also appeared in Livestock: Tales from the Un-herd, Deadly Drabbles by Hungry Shadow Press,…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Eboni J. Dunbar

Eboni J. Dunbar (She/her) is a queer, black woman who writes queer and black speculative fiction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner. She received her BA from Macalester College in English and her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She is a VONA Alum and the former managing editor for the Hugo Award-Winning FIYAH Literary Magazine. Her work can be found in Stellium Literary Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Drabblecast, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Nightlight Podcast, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She also has a novella, Stone and Steel, out from Neon Hemlock Press. Eboni…

A Point of Pride: Interview with L. Stephenson

Out to his family and friends since he was sixteen, L. Stephenson’s short stories and poetry have been haunting horror anthologies and online magazines since 2018, the best of which can be found in his recently-released mini collection, Candles, Bullets, & Dead Skin. Graduating university in 2010 with a degree in Film & TV Screenwriting, Stephenson released his first novella, The Goners in 2021. Originally the beginning of a trilogy that has now fused into his debut slasher novel, The Boatmore Butcher, due out in September of this year through Dark Ink Books. What inspired you to start writing?  I…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Brent Lambert

Brent Lambert is a Black, queer man who heavily believes in the transformative power of speculative fiction across media formats. As a founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine, he turned that belief into action and became part of a Hugo Award-winning team. He resides in San Diego, but spent a lot of time moving around as a military brat. His family roots are in the Cajun country of Louisiana. Currently, he has a novella A Necessary Chaos upcoming from Neon Hemlock and is part of the upcoming cyberpunk/solarpunk anthology Fighting the Future and Black horror anthology All These Sunken Souls.…

A Point of Pride: Interview with James Lefebure

James Lefebure is a Scottish-born, Liverpool-living horror author. Splitting his time between watching horror, reading horror and writing horror, he can often be found arguing with people that Jason would whoop Michael. His two novels The Books of Sarah and God In The Livingroom have proven to his long-suffering, fantasy-reading husband that James will probably never write a story about dragons or an orphan with a destiny. He's a part of two LGBT horror anthologies—We're Here and The Horror Collection: LGBTQIA Edition. He can be found on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. He does have a Twitter, but doesn’t understand how it…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Arley Sorg

Arley Sorg is an associate agent at kt literary and co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. He is an SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist, a two-time Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is also a senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He is a guest critiquer for the current Odyssey Workshop and the week five instructor for this year's Clarion West Workshop. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Vince A. Liaguno

Vince A. Liaguno is an award-winning writer, anthologist, editor, and an occasional poet. He is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor of Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (co-edited with Chad Helder), the acclaimed Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology (co-edited with Rena Mason), and the forthcoming Unspeakable Horror 3: Dark Rainbow Rising. His debut novel, 2006’s The Literary Six, was a tribute to the slasher films of the eighties and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY). Healthcare administrator by day, pop culture enthusiast by night, his jam: books, slasher films, and Jamie Lee Curtis. He is a member (and…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Corey Niles

Corey Niles was born and raised in the Rust Belt, where he garnered his love of horror. His debut horror novel, Blood & Dirt, was released from NineStar Press in August 2022. His writing has appeared in over twenty publications, including issues, anthologies, and collections from Nightmare Magazine, the Horror Writers Association, Ghost Orchid Press, and Lycan Valley Press. You can keep up to date with his recent and forthcoming publications at coreyniles.com. What inspired you to start writing? From an early age, I loved storytelling. I think it was the escapism. Hanging up my problems for a couple of…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Joshua Viola

Joshua Viola is a 2021 Splatterpunk Award nominee, Colorado Book Award winner, and editor of the StokerCon™ 2021 Souvenir Anthology. He is the co-author of the Denver Moon series with Warren Hammond. Their graphic novel, Denver Moon: Metamorphosis, was included on the 2018 Bram Stoker Award® Preliminary Ballot. Viola edited the Denver Post #1 bestselling horror anthology Nightmares Unhinged, and co-edited Cyber World—named one of the best science fiction anthologies of 2016 by Barnes & Noble. His first novel, The Bane of Yoto, won the USA Best Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, International Book Awards, and Independent Publishers Book…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Gretchen Felker-Martin

Gretchen Felker-Martin is Massachusetts-based horror writer and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, is out now from Tor Nightfire. You can follow her work @scumbelievable on Twitter. What inspired you to start writing?  I don’t think it was any one thing. Bob Flanagan, the famous masochist and performance artist, had a wonderful spoken-word poem about the roots of his masochism, and he lists just hundreds and hundreds of factors, and it’s like that for me. The woods of rural New Hampshire, Monica Furlong, James Gurney’s Dinotopia, my childhood asthma, watching Clive Barker movies and Alien too young, being bullied for…

Point of Pride Intro: Always Keep Your Pride, Shatter the Closets by Maxwell I. Gold

By: Maxwell I. Gold A few weeks ago, men dressed in black and red clothes, carrying flags of an evil undeserving to be named. Their chants and slogans—there will be blood—chorused against the backdrop of a cold, Midwestern morning. It was an awful reminder of a time when evil men dared to reshape the world in their hideous image. This wasn’t some fiction, or fatalistic hyperbole, but individuals protesting. Dressed in swastikas and combat gear outside a drag brunch in downtown Columbus, Ohio. No, this wasn’t a protest, but a deliberate display of hatred for members of our community and…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Koji Suzuki

Koji Suzuki is a Japanese writer, who was born in Hamamatsu and lives in Tokyo. Suzuki is the author of the Ring novels, which have been adapted into other formats, including films, manga, TV series and video games.  Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so why? If not, what were you writing initially and what compelled you to move into horror? My first novel Paradise was a love story in the South Pacific during the Age of Discovery (my second novel was Ring) and my third novel was also situated in the South…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Lisa Tuttle

Lisa Tuttle, a Texan by birth, Scottish by inclination and residence, is the author of 13 novels and seven short story collections. Windhaven, written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, was her first novel and his second and has been almost continuously in print since 1981. She’s also written non-fiction and books for children and worked as a journalist and library assistant. The Curious Affair of the Missing Mummies, the third in a series of 1890s-set, supernaturally tinged mysteries, is forthcoming from Jo Fletcher Books, as well as a new collection, Riding the Nightmare, is out from Valancourt this summer.…

The Horror Writers Association Announces the Scholarship from Hell Recipients

The Scholarship from Hell is the only scholarship offered by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) that puts the recipient right into the intensive, hands-on workshop environment of Horror University, which takes place during StokerCon®. This year’s recipient is Alex Luceli Jiménez! The StokerCon®2023 Committee Chairs read nearly 60 submissions. They had this to say: "Alex’s essay resonated with the convention committee, who were excited by her dedication toward strengthening her craft. Additionally, Alex’s work showcases unique experiences and points of view that are needed in the horror genre, and that will inspire other writers as her career continues." Alex Luceli…