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
Photo credit: John Kaczanowski
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.
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 few alibis. (Just in case.)
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.
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 graduate. His site: arleysorg.com. Twitter: @arleysorg Facebook is… a weird number.
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).
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.
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 Pacific, the story centers around a destined love story between a crew on a tuna fishing ship and a lovely female singer-songwriter. I personally am a yachtsman, so the ocean is the one situation I can really show my best.
Photo Credit: Colin Murray
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.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisatuttlewriter
Christina Sng is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares, A Collection of Dreamscapes, and Tortured Willows. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and art appear in numerous venues worldwide, including Interstellar Flight Magazine, New Myths, Penumbric, Southwest Review, and The Washington Post.
FB, Instagram, Twitter: @christinasng
When I played as a child, I was always telling a story. Writing allowed me to immortalize it on paper.
I grew up with it. The 80s was the golden age of horror and I dived right in after my brother, a horror fan himself, introduced me to “The Amityville Horror” and “Poltergeist” on TV. Singapore had them on prime time! 🙂
I like to create characters anyone can relate to. Inspired by Lee Murray and Gene Flynn who encouraged me to write about characters from my culture for their award-winning anthology Black Cranes, I found myself creating a strong, stoic military leader who was brave, indomitable, resourceful, and ultimately human in my post-apocalyptic novelette “Fury”.
Horror allows me to write about what I observe and experience in this world. It has helped me process what I see, realizing that while there is an abundance of cruelty and evil in the world, there is also a lot of good.
The horror genre has become more diverse and inclusive over the years. It intrigues me, reading about other cultures and stories. Knowing them brings us closer as a people. I think horror will evolve with us over time as it always has, charting our fears in stories.
It is wonderful to see it so well-embraced. Culture in Asia greatly varies by country, although we do share similarities. I believe representation will grow as more writers emerge with their own stories, waiting to be shared with the world.
Glen in The Walking Dead. He was the best of us, Asian and human. Ashin from Ashin of the North—her quiet resolve was relentless. Sang-hwa in Train to Busan—the real hero of the story. Kate in my novelette “Fury”—in her, I infused all of our best qualities.
Lee Murray, Gene Flynn, Angela Yuriko Smith, Yi Izzy Yu, and contributors from the anthologies Black Cranes and
Unquiet Spirits
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro started writing stories at age six; she’s still at it.
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?
Nancy Holder is the former vice president and former board member of HWA. She is New York Times bestselling author of over a hundred book-length projects and hundreds of short stories, essays, and articles. She has received 7 Bram Stoker Awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association and was named Faust Grand Master from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. She is known for writing material for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other intellectual properties, as well as novelizing movies such as Wonder Woman and Crimson Peak. She taught in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program offered through the University of Southern Maine for thirteen years, and many of her students have gone on to high-profile publishing success. She has been “investitured” [sic] as a Baker Street Irregular and an Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes. She is currently writing the forthcoming supernatural comics
They Call Me Midnight
Editor, anthologist, and reviewer Paula Guran has edited more than fifty science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies and more than fifty novels and collections featuring the same. She was senior editor for Prime Books for seven years. Previously, she edited the Juno fantasy imprint from its small press inception through its incarnation as an imprint of Pocket Books. Guran edits the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series (first ten volumes with Prime; now published by Pyr). In an earlier life, she produced the weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Stokers, an IHG award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination), edited Horror Garage (earning another IHG and a second World Fantasy nomination), and has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications. The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 2 was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2022. Guran currently reviews for Locus Magazine. She lives in Akron, Ohio, near enough to her grandchildren to frequently be indulgent.
I came to editing by a unique route. I had a background in journalism/editing as a teenager, but my first career was in technical theatre. My second career was as a full-time mom (and consequently, school/community volunteer). Although I was a science fiction and fantasy reader, with some exceptions, I wasn’t a big horror fan until I started discovering a lot of great writers/fiction around 1994. I wanted to spread the word and help writers and just sort of fell into it via the internet.
Ellen Datlow, of course. Also, Gardner Dozois, Ann VanderMeer, David Hartwell, Kathryn Cranmer, Gordon Van Gelder, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, and more.
More the changes to publishing as a whole rather than just horror. The internet provided me with a way to make myself a niche in the field. Print-on-demand provided me entry to professional-level work that led to other things. Borders book chain wanting more genre fiction from independent presses gave me a full-time job. Lots of other things, of course, including the rise of fantasy and urban fantasy, played parts.
Not really, at least no more than society in general. At first, I think people assumed I was younger than I am. And since I entered the field at a relatively late age, I never particularly advertised my age.=&0=&
Not really in horror, but the orcamancer in Sam J. Miller’s
Blackfish City
Kathryn Ptacek is the editor of the landmark Women of Darkness I and Women of Darkness II, published at a time when most anthologies included few or no women writers. She knew they were out there, though. She has published numerous novels, short stories, articles, reviews, and poetry in various genres. She edits the monthly HWA Newsletter. She is also the recipient of three of HWA’s awards: The Silver Hammer Award, the Mentor of the Year Award, and the Richard Laymon President’s Award. Her books are available on Amazon and from Crossroad Press as e-books. She also sells extra copies of her print books; contact her at gilaqueen@att.net or find her on Facebook.
The first two novels that sold were historical romances (Satan’s Angel and My Lady Rogue). I had always loved history, and at that time, historical romance was hot hot hot … so I thought, what the heck! I’ll give it a try.
As it happens I have some darker elements in my historicals… I wasn’t even aware that I seemed to be moving in that direction … But looking back, I can see I was drawn to horror, although it wasn’t a separate genre as such back then. Long before that I had entered a radio’s writing contest about the Christmas spirit, and my entry had this dark creature crouching on someone’s roof late at night. Well, not precisely Santa or festive! And when I was eight or so, I did a series of watercolor comics which featured monsters. And when I was five and went to a New Year’s Eve party with my folks, I wandered through the house and found an older kid watching a movie:
Frankenstein
Photo Credit: Author self-portrait, 2022
Bryan Thao Worra is the author of 10+ books. One of the first Lao Americans to arrive in the US in 1973, and the first Lao American to hold a professional membership in the Horror Writers Association. He holds over 20 national and international awards for his writing and community leadership. He served as the president of the International Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association from 2016-2022. He has presented at the Smithsonian and the 2012 London Summer Games on the role of the imagination and memory in creative writing as a poet and prose writer, focusing on the creative journeys of Southeast Asians, and will discuss his work at the Library of Congress on May 2nd.
@Bthaoworra Instagram
@Thaoworra Twitter
These days I think a poet has a thousand beginnings. Sometimes I trace it back to an old encyclopedia with gorgons and dinosaurs, another, a 3rd-grade role-playing game almost no one remembers. Others it feels like an unrequited crush on a classmate, a fortune teller’s prediction about me shared to my grandmother, a ghost in an attic, or just the absence of seeing stories like my own in the news, in movies and novels, and especially poetry. Each moment was liberating in its own way.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
Photo Credit: Misha Stone
Nisi Shawl’s debut novel Everfair, an alternate history of Africa’s Congo region, was a Nebula Award finalist. They’re the author of the Otherwise Award-winning story collection Filter House. They edited both volumes of the acclaimed New Suns anthology series, winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, and Ignyte awards. With Cynthia Ward they co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusivity for over a decade. Recent publications include the horror collections Our Fruiting Bodies and Exploring Dark Short Fiction 3: A Primer to Nisi Shawl, as well as Speculation, a middle grade fantasy novel about redeeming a family curse.
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?
What inspired you to start writing?My origin story is probably a very familiar one to most writers. It started early in childhood with a love of books and a reverence for those who created them. Then, in primary school, praise came from teachers for my early efforts at written storytelling. High school hit, then adulthood, and somewhere along the line, I shelved the childhood dream of becoming a writer. I picked it up again when my first child started school and I undertook online study to earn a Creative Writing Diploma, naively thinking I might have time to devote to learning the craft (three years and two more children later, I graduated….)
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
Photographer’s Credit: Marilyn Gallagher
Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for his short fiction, Stephen Gallagher has built a career both as a novelist and as a creator of primetime miniseries and episodic television. In the US he was lead writer on NBC’s Crusoe and creator of CBS Television’s Eleventh Hour. His fifteen novels include Chimera, Oktober, and Valley of Lights. He’s the creator of Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, in a series of novels that includes The Kingdom of Bones, The Bedlam Detective, and The Authentic William James. http://www.stephengallagher.com
I got my professional start in radio drama with science fiction and thrillers and an early TV gig on Doctor Who, but even then I could see that this wasn’t my real path. Not in prose fiction, anyway, which is where I really wanted to make a mark. I’d read a lot of SF in my teens but all the new work seemed to be from writers with the hardest of hard science backgrounds, speculating on a level I could never hope to reach.
But then the strands of what I’d been doing came together in a way that I hadn’t predicted, with a genetic thriller that echoed themes of Mary Shelley and Moreau in a present-day setting. I ran the idea past my first agent and she encouraged me to run with it. That was Chimera, and it set me on the horror track. I researched the science but it was the darker implications of the story that gripped me. I began to sense how there are story patterns that tap into the human subconscious at the deepest levels, universal patterns of fear and desire. They can play in any genre but horror’s where they flourish.
By the grace of the junior library and the Salford market comic book stand I came in with a solid classical education in Wells, Conan Doyle, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Famous Monsters of Filmland. Anthologies were great for exploring and I was drawn mostly to the horror of commonplace settings. Lovecraft didn’t grab me, and for Machen and Dunsany the most I can say is that I was “aware of their work” (which was Stephen King’s diplomatic response when I asked our publisher to comp him a copy of
The Boat House)
Del Gibson lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Gibson has had 26 short stories digitally published, as well as several articles and poems. When Gibson isn’t writing, she is researching and reading. She is actively engaged in the writing community by helping other horror authors. She is a Beta and ARC reader, and part of launch teams to promote other authors’ work. Gibson runs a popular Facebook group called HORROR CENTRAL, and collaborates with YouTube Podcasts where her short stories are read out by narrators. Gibson is an author of horror, but also reviews horror movies, books and music, on YouTube Live streams, and her social media platforms. She has completed a level 5 Creative Writing Certificate in 2019. Then went on to complete the level 7 Creative Writing Diploma in 2020. Passing both courses with Distinction. One of her short stories was recently published in an anthology of flash fiction, in eBook and paperback. Follow her on her Facebook group
