A Point of Pride: Interview with Allison Church

Allison Church (a.k.a. DONALD ALLEN KIRCH) is a Transgender Author who lives in the Midwest of the United States. She is an avid lover of horror, science fiction, and fantasy and will challenge ANYONE on her knowledge of TV “pop” culture. A die-hard fan of “Star Trek,” “Babylon 5,” and “Doctor Who,” she does not believe in the “NO Win” scenario! She LOVES everything about the Paranormal! What inspired you to start writing? I have always LOVED the role of a Storyteller. The power to hold a person’s attention is a rare and wonderful thing in our times. However, with…

A Point of Pride: Interview with C.R. Langille

C.R. Langille spent many a Saturday afternoon watching monster movies with their mother. It wasn't long before they started crafting nightmares to share with their readers. They are a retired, disabled veteran with a deep love for weird and creepy tales. This prompted them to form Timber Ghost Press in January of 2021. They are an affiliate member of the Horror Writer's Association, a member of the League of Utah Writers, and they received their MFA: Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. https://biolinks.heropost.io/CRLangille What inspired you to start writing? When I was in the 6th grade, I picked up…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in over 90 publications such as LeVar Burton Reads and Popular Science, as well as in six languages. By night, she has been a finalist for the Nebula Award. By day, she works as a Narrative Designer writing romance games. Her first horror novella and short story collection will be published in 2022. What inspired you to start writing? The strong emotions I got from hearing stories as a kid. I loved fairy tales, horror stories, sad endings, and awe-inspiring descriptions—and when I figured out that I could inspire emotions in other people, I…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Katrina Monroe

Katrina Monroe is the author of They Drown Our Daughters. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife, kids, and a ghost named Eddie who haunts their bedroom closets. Photo Credit to Bert Jones Photography What inspired you to start writing? I’ve always written—short stories when I was a kid and angsty poems when I was a teenager—but it wasn’t until I became a young mom that I decided to pursue it as something more than just an outlet for big feelings. I was in an unhealthy relationship and needed to prove to myself that I was intelligent and capable—things my…

A Point of Pride: Interview with Marisca Pichette

Marisca Pichette is a bisexual author, writing about all kinds of monsters. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, PseudoPod, Apparition Lit, Grimdark Magazine, Uncharted Magazine, The NoSleep Podcast, Fusion Fragment, and PodCastle, among others. She lives in Western Massachusetts, collecting fragments. What inspired you to start writing? My main inspiration when I began writing was the beauty of language. I loved creating lush imagery, drawing on the natural world and books I was reading by long-dead white men. I didn’t realize at first how limited these stories were. As my writing developed, I began searching for the…

A Point of Pride: Interview with David Demchuk

I'm David Demchuk, author of The Bone Mother and RED X, and I would be happy to be interviewed as part of the HWA Pride Month LGBTQ+ author interviews. I live in Toronto, Canada and have been writing for print, stage, digital and other media for more than 40 years. My debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian…
A Point of Pride Series

A Point of Pride Series

E.F. Schraeder is the author of the queer gothic novella Liar: Memoir of a Haunting (Omnium Gatherum, 2021), the queer monster tale As Fast as She Can (Sirens Call Publications, 2022), a story collection, and two poetry chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Dancing in the Shadows: A Tribute to Anne Rice, What Remains, Lost Contact, Mystery Weekly Magazine, Strange Horizons, and other journals and anthologies. Schraeder’s nonfiction has appeared in Vastarien: A Literary Journal; Radical Teacher; the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom blog, and elsewhere. Current creative projects include a monster’s coming-of-age novella and a full-length manuscript of poems.…

2021 Bram Stoker Awards® Winners

Denver, Colorado, May 16, 2021 The Horror Writers Association (HWA), the premier organization of writers and publishers of horror and dark fantasy, announces this year’s Bram Stoker Awards® winners at its first in-person ceremony during StokerCon™ at Denver, Colorado’s Curtis Hotel. “The Horror genre continues its amazing renaissance. We are truly in a golden period, with every category overflowing with tremendous works,” said John Palisano, HWA President. “The winners and finalists show a diverse group of amazing voices from new and veteran creators. Our HWA members and awards juries have shown dedication and objectivity to the selection process for outstanding…

Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Horror: Interview with Kris Ringman

Kris Ringman (she/they) is a deaf queer author, artist, and wanderer. Her multicultural, lyrical fiction plays along the boundaries of magical realism, fantasy, and horror. She is the author of two Lambda Literary finalist books: I Stole You: Stories from the Fae (Handtype Press, 2017) and Makara: a novel (Handtype Press, 2012), and the upcoming Sail Skin: poems (Handtype Press, 2022). They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. http://krisringman.com What attracted you to the horror genre, and what do you think the genre has taught you about yourself and the world? My fascination with horror started probably too young, but has never abated. At…

Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Horror: Interview with Michael R. Collings

Michael R. Collings, named Grand Master by the 2016 World Horror Conference, is an educator, literary scholar and critic, poet, novelist, essayist, columnist, reviewer, and editor whose work over three decades—more than one hundred published books and chapbooks, along with thousands of chapters, essays, reviews, and poems—has concentrated on science fiction, fantasy, and horror, emphasizing the works of Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis, and others. His books for Starmont House, beginning in 1984, were among the earliest serious scholarly appraisals of King. His 1990 study of Card was the first book-length exploration of Card's fictions. His wide-ranging publications…

Introduction to the Deaf/Hard of Hearing Horror Author Interview Series by Christopher Jon Heuer

Christopher Jon Heuer is the author of Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution as well as All Your Parts Intact: Poems.  He is the editor of Tripping the Tale Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers.  He is a professor of English at Gallaudet University in Washington DC. Is Deaf Horror fiction a genre or a sub-subgenre? There is no misspelling above.  I’m inventing a new term for a weird situation.  When we label something a genre, such as Horror Science Fiction, or Fantasy, we are saying “This is what it is.  This is its definition.”  Horror…

Women in Horror: Interview with Tina Pavlik

Tina Pavlik is a lifelong fan of horror and working on her first book series in the genre. She publishes dark fantasy and erotica in another life for Red Sage Publishing and Changeling Press. Her horror stories sometimes draw on her experiences as a historian, tour guide, and paranormal investigator of one of the most haunted locations in the U.S. She currently works in extras casting in television and film on projects like Amazon’s upcoming show The Peripheral and HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. As an extra, she worked on Cinemax’s Banshee and Robert Kirkman’s Outcast and on films like Masterminds,…

Women in Horror: Interview with Emma J. Gibbon

Emma J. Gibbon is originally from Yorkshire in the U.K. and now lives in Midcoast Maine. She is an award-winning horror writer, Rhysling-nominated speculative poet, and librarian. Her debut fiction collection, Dark Blood Comes from the Feet, from Trepidatio Publishing, was one of NPR’s best books of 2020 and won the Maine Literary Book Award for Speculative Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Dark Tome and Toasted Cake podcasts, and the anthologies, The Muse & The Flame, Wicked Haunted, Wicked Weird and is upcoming in 13 Haunted Houses. Her poetry has been published in the HWA Poetry Showcase Volume VIII, Strange Horizons, Liminality, Pedestal Magazine,…

Women in Horror: Interview with Christina Sng

Christina Sng is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Collection of Dreamscapes (2020) and A Collection of Nightmares (2017). Her poetry, fiction, essays, and art have appeared in numerous venues worldwide, including Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Interstellar Flight Magazine, Penumbric, Southwest Review, and The Washington Post. Christina’s most recent title, Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken (2021), is the Bram Stoker nominated collaborative poetry collection with Lee Murray, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Geneve Flynn. Visit her at christinasng.com and connect @christinasng. What inspired you to start writing? It feels like I’ve always been writing. I always had a pen and…

Women in Horror: Interview with Cindy O’Quinn

Cindy O’Quinn is a four-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated writer. Author of “Lydia”, from the Shirley Jackson Award-winning anthology: The Twisted Book of Shadows,  “The Thing I Found Along a Dirt Patch Road”, “A Gathering on the Mountain”, and “One and Done”. She is an Appalachian writer from the mountains of West Virginia. Steeped in folklore at an early age. Cindy now lives in the woods of northern Maine, on the old Tessier Homestead, which makes the ideal backdrop for writing her dark stories and poetry. Her work has been published or forthcoming in The Bad Book, HWA Poetry Showcase Vol…

Women in Horror: Interview for Jennifer McMahon

Jennifer McMahon is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels, including Promise Not to Tell and The Winter People. Her latest, The Children on the Hill, will be out in April. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella. What inspired you to start writing? I wrote my first short story in third grade, “The Haunted Meatball.” I still remember that rush I got when I realized I could sit down and create a world on paper where anything could happen – even a little boy being chased through the woods by a glowing meatball. I was hooked. I have been…

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…