Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Nisi Shawl

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…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stephen 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.…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Terry Dowling

Terry Dowling is author of Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award winner for Best Collection 2007), An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Blackwater Days, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, its “premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows and its “most acclaimed writer of the dark fantastic” by Cemetery Dance magazine. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its twenty-one year run than any other writer. Terry’s…

Pacific Islander Heritage: Interview with Del Gibson

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…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Ramsey Campbell

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction.” He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. The two volumes of Phantasmagorical Stories offer a sixty-year retrospective of…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Yvonne Navarro

Yvonne Navarro is an award-winning author of twenty-four published novels and a lot of short stories, articles and a reference dictionary. She writes several genres but favors horror or dark fantasy. Her work has won the Bram Stoker and IATW Awards, among others. Her shorter work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and magazines. Her franchise work includes the Predator, Aliens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V-Wars, and more. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and dotes on her rescued dogs, Kyah and Chewbecca, and cranky talking parakeet, BirdZilla. Find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/yvonne.navarro.001 Did you start out writing or working…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Maria Dong

Maria Dong is the author of Liar, Dreamer, Thief. Her short fiction, articles, and poetry have been published in dozens of magazines, like the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed, Augur, Nightmare, Khoreo, Fantasy, Apex, and Apparition Literary Magazine. She is represented by Amy Bishop at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. What inspired you to start writing? I was in a car accident about ten years ago, and while I was recovering I was in a house that did not have internet or cable. And I was really bored, and I was bed-bound, so I started writing stories to entertain…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stefan Dziemianowicz

Stefan Dziemianowicz has edited more than fifty anthologies of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, including the Bram-Stoker Award-winning (thanks, HWA!) Horrors: 365 Scary Stories. He is the author of the story collection Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night and co-editor of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. He was a founding editor of the British Fantasy Award-winning Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction and his reviews and features have appeared in the Washington Post, Locus, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. His fingerprints are all over a lot of genre titles and literary classics in the marketplace…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Angela Liu

Angela Liu is a Chinese American writer from NYC. She studied East Asian Studies at New York University and researched mixed reality at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Japan, with a focus on new narrative platforms and tangible interfaces for remote communication. She now works in IT consulting and Japanese-to-English translation while raising a monster-obsessed toddler. Her stories and poetry are published/forthcoming in Strange Horizons, The Dark, Nightmare Magazine, Clarkesworld, Cast of Wonders, Fusion Fragment, and Dark Matter Magazine among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram: @liu_angela What inspired…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Lucy Taylor

Lucy Taylor is the Stoker Award–winning author of seven novels and five short story collections. Her most recent work includes stories in Body Shocks (Tachyon) Horror Library, Volume 7 (Dark Moon Books), and the Western/horror novella Desolation (Poltergeist Press). Her work has been translated into Italian, German, Czech, Russian, Spanish, and other languages. She lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and enjoys ballroom and Latin dancing, Pilates, hiking, swimming, and being a 24/7 concierge, chef, and dispenser-of-treats to her two rescue kitties. Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Nancy Kilpatrick

Nancy Kilpatrick is an Award-winning author and editor. She has published 23 novels, 3 novellas, over 250 short stories, 6 collections, and has edited 15 anthologies. She wrote the non-fiction book The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined. Much of her work has been translated into 9 languages. Her most recent project is the six-book novel series Thrones of Blood, the final volume #6 coming soon in print and ebook. The series has been optioned for film and TV. Website: nancykilpatrick.com Facebook: nancy.kilpatrick.31 Twitter: @nancykwriter Occasional Blog: http://nancykilpatrickwriter.blogspot.ca/ Instagram: nancykilpatrickauthor/ Amazon author Page: amazon.com/author/www.nancykilpatrick.com Newsletter subscription (free): nancykilpatrick.com…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Ashley Deng

Ashley Deng is a Canadian-born Chinese-Jamaican author of dark fantasy and horror. She holds a BSc in biochemistry, specializing her studies toward making accessible the often-cryptic world of science and medicine. When not writing, she is a hobbyist medical/scientific illustrator and spends her spare time overthinking society and culture. Her work has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Augur Magazine, and others. Her climate horror novella, Dehiscent, is available August 2023 from Tenebrous Press. You can find her at ashedeng.ca or on various social media as @ashesandmochi and @baroqueintentions. What inspired you to start writing? I was a voracious reader…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Marge Simon

  Marge Simon lives in Ocala, Florida, with her husband, poet/writer Bruce Boston. She has won multiple Bram Stoker Awards, Rhysling Awards, the Elgin, Dwarf Stars, and Strange Horizons Readers’ Awards. She received HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Marge’s works have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, New Myths, and Daily Science Fiction. Her stories also appear in anthologies such as the 2020 Bookfest Award-winning Under Her Skin, the Colorado Book Award-winning Shadow Atlas, and Sifting the Ashes, to name a few. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest poet/writer and is…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his novel Blood Kin and his novel Ubo was a finalist. He has published over 500 short stories in his 40+ year career. Some of his best are collected in Thanatrauma and Figures Unseen from Valancourt Books, and in The Night Doctor & Other Tales from Macabre Ink. You can visit his home on the web at www.stevetem.com. Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so why? If not, what…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Reggie Oliver

Reggie Oliver is an actor, director, playwright, illustrator and award-winning author of fiction. Published work includes six plays, three novels, an illustrated children’s book, The Hauntings at Tankerton Park (Zagava 2016), nine volumes of short stories, including Mrs Midnight (2011 winner of Children of the Night Award for best work of supernatural fiction), and, the biography of the writer Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed (Bloomsbury 1998). His stories have appeared in over one hundred different anthologies and three “selected” editions of his stories have been published, the latest being Stages of Fear (Black Shuck Books 2020). His ninth volume…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stephen Volk

  Stephen Volk created BBC TV’s notorious Halloween mockumentary Ghostwatch and the award-winning ITV drama series Afterlife. His feature screenplays include The Awakening starring Rebecca Hall, William Friendkin's The Guardian, and Ken Russell’s Gothic starring Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley. He is also the author of four collections – Dark Corners, Monsters in the Heart (which won the British Fantasy Award), The Parts We Play, and Lies of Tenderness. His other books include the acclaimed Dark Masters Trilogy, featuring Peter Cushing, Alfred Hitchcock, and Dennis Wheatley, while Under a Raven’s Wing teams Sherlock Holmes with Poe’s detective Dupin in 1870s Paris. You can visit Stephen’s website at www.stephenvolk.net or follow him on Twitter: @stevevolkwriter…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Kathe Koja

  Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction and creates and produces live and virtual immersive stories. Her work has won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film.  DARK PARK is forthcoming in August 2023 and CATHERINE THE GHOST in Fall 2024. @kathekoja on IG and FB https://kathekoja.com/ 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? The first stories I sold were to SF magazines and anthologies. When I wrote The Cipher, which was actually an offshoot of…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Lambda Award, and ReaderCon Certificate. She loves rats and chihuahuas (they're the same thing) and currently has three big monitor lizards. She's vegetarian, but no longer radically so, and strives to be something of a Zoharic scholar. 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? I always wrote fantasy and horror. These few questions are all about being old, which is not primary in my life or…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of fifty novels and four hundred shorter works, including stories, essays, reviews, film and TV scripts, stage plays, introductions, and magazine articles, as well as a book of poetry. His work has been made into films, animation, and comics, and he has won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Raymond Chandler lifetime award, numerous Bram Stoker Awards, Lifetime Horror Award, and the Spur Award. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, Karen, and pit bull, Rudy. The viewpoints expressed in this interview are the opinions of the individual being interviewed and do not necessarily…

Celebrating Our Elders: An Introduction by Linda D. Addison

Linda D. Addison, award-winning author of five collections, including How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, the first African-American recipient of the HWA Bram Stoker Award®, received the HWA Mentor of the Year Award, the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Her site: www.LindaAddisonWriter.com. Introduction:  HWA Celebrating Our Elders interview series by Linda D. Addison The word wisdom is often used when talking about Elders, but what does that mean? Of all the meanings for this word, common sense is one that stood out to me. When we say someone has good common sense,…