ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Born in Ciechanow, Poland, ANIA AHLBORN has always been drawn to the darker, mysterious, and morbid side of life. Her earliest childhood memory is of crawling through a hole in the chain link fence that separated her family home from the large wooded cemetery. She’d spend hours among the headstones, breaking up bouquets of silk flowers so that everyone had their equal share. Ania’s first novel, Seed, was self-published. It clawed its way up the Amazon charts to the #1 horror spot, earning her a multi-book deal and a key to the kingdom of the macabre. Eight years later, her work has been lauded by the likes of Publishers Weekly, New York Daily News, and the New York Times. She hopes to one day be invited to dinner at Stephen King’s place, where she will immediately be crushed beneath the weight of her imposter syndrome.
KELLEY ARMSTRONG is the author of the Rockton crime thrillers. Past works include the Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Cainsville paranormal mystery series, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies, the Age of Legends fantasy YA series and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. Armstrong lives in Ontario, Canada with her family.
* * *
As an actor, AMBER BENSON is best known for her role as Tara Maclay on the hit television show Buffy The Vampire Slayer. But since then she has become a notable novelist/director/screenwriter. She co-created and directed the animated supernatural web series Ghosts of Albion for the BBC (with Christopher Golden) and co-directed the independent feature Drones. She is also the author of the bestselling Calliope Reaper-Jones series of novels and the Witches of Echo Park trilogy for Penguin.
* * *
CHESYA BURKE is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Florida. She received her Master’s degree in African American Studies from Georgia State University in 2015. Currently, Chesya is a double fellow, and she teaches such topics as Black Women Spec Fic Writers, The Racial Dynamics of Nationality Politics and The Literature of Resistance: From Nat Turner to Black Panther. In addition, Burke wrote several articles for the African American National Biography published by Harvard and Oxford University Press. Burke is an award-winning writer, who has published nearly a hundred stories and articles, leading Grammy-nominated spoken word artist and poet Nikki Giovanni to call her work “stunning.” Her story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the country and her novel, The Strange Crimes of Little Africa, debuted in Dec 2015 to great reviews. She edited the Locus nominated anthology, Hidden Youth, with Mikki Kendall, and Samuel Delany called her “a formidable new master of the macabre.”
* * *
RACHEL CAINE is the #1 bestselling author of more than fifty books, including the Morganville Vampires series, the Great Library series, the Honors series in YA; she’s also known for the urban fantasy Weather Warden series, and the Stillhouse Lake thriller series on the adult shelves. She’s published in thirty languages around the world, and lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband, artists and golden-age comic dealer/historian R. Cat Conrad.
Website: rachelcaine.com
* * *
KRISTIN DEARBORN has been writing since before she could hold a pen, dictating stories to her mother. Thanks to nefarious influences like Scooby Doo and Bunnicula, her tastes turned to the macabre at an early age. A graduate of Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program, Kristin works in finance during the day, and plays with monsters at night. When she’s not reading or writing, you can find her riding her Harley, rock climbing, or striving to summit the New England high peaks, no matter what the season. Kristin is the author of Stolen Away, Sacrifice Island, Trinity, Whispers, and Woman in White.
* * *
TANANARIVE DUE is an author, screenwriter and educator who is a leading voice in black speculative fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. She is the former Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Spelman College (2012-2014) and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror in the Department of African-American Studies at UCLA. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles and the screenwriting program at Antioch University Santa Barbara. Due is an executive producer of the Shudder black horror documentary Horror Noire.
The American Book Award-winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author or co-author of twelve novels. In 2010, Due was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. Her short-story collection, Ghost Summer, won a 2016 British Fantasy Award. She has been named to the Grio 100 and the Ebony Power 100.
Due also co-authored a civil rights memoir with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. (Patricia Stephens Due took part in the nation’s first “Jail-In” in 1960, spending 49 days in jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter.) Freedom in the Family was named 2003’s Best Civil Rights Memoir by Black Issues Book Review. Her parents, including her father, attorney John Due, were recently inducted into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
* * *
THEODORA GOSS is the World Fantasy and Locus Award-winning author of the short-story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequel European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at theodoragoss.com
* * *
KAT HOWARD is the author of the novels Roses and Rot and the Alex Award-winning An Unkindness of Magicians. Her short-fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, is now out from Saga Press and she’s writing The Books of Magic for Vertigo Comics. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2014. She currently lives in New Hampshire, where she is working on her next projects.
ALMA KATSU writes historical fiction with elements of horror and the supernatural. The Hunger (Putnam) was named a Best Book of 2018 by Barnes & Noble, Powells, and The Observer; one of NPR’s 100 Favorite Horror Stories; is a nominee for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel; and won the 2018 Western Heritage Award for Best Novel. Her first book, The Taker, was one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2011.
* * *
Defying all odds is what #1 New York Times and international bestselling author SHERRILYN KENYON does best. Rising from extreme poverty as a child that culminated in being a homeless mother with an infant, she has become one of the most popular and influential authors in the world (in both adult and young adult fiction), with dedicated legions of fans known as Menyons–thousands of whom proudly sport tattoos from her numerous genre-defying series. Since her first book debuted in 1993, while she was still in college, she has placed more than eighty novels on the New York Times list in all formats and genres, including manga and graphic novels, and has more than seventy million books in print worldwide. Her current series include: Dark-Hunters®, Chronicles of Nick®, Deadman’s Cross™, Black Hat Society™, Nevermore™, Silent Swans™, Lords of Avalon® and The League®.
Join her and her Menyons online at QueenofAllShadows.com and www.facebook.com/mysherrilyn
* * *
Intense gamer, former teacher and current mastermind of all around mayhem, MADAUG KENYON first started writing in grade school, on his mother’s walls. Deciding that near death experiences weren’t exactly his forte, he traded his crayons for a computer, and once he broke away from his severe gaming addiction, realized that his keyboard could also be used to create his own worlds. He’s been doing that ever since. The author of his own online intergalactic comic, Space Sovereign, he’s currently at work finishing his second novel.
* * *
SARAH LANGAN is the author of three novels and dozens of short stories. Her novel Audrey’s Door is under option with Octavia Spencer for adaptation, and her most recent story, “Night Nurse” is under option with Paramount. She’s just finished a new novel, Good Neighbors, which she hopes her agent soon sells for truckloads of money. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the filmmaker JT Petty, and two daughters.
* * *
HELEN MARSHALL is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, which won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, emerged from her work as a book historian. Rather than taking the long view of history, her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds, and won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. Her debut novel The Migration was released by Random House Canada and Titan in 2019.
* * *
JENNIFER MCMAHON is the New York Times bestselling author of nine suspense novels, including Promise Not to Tell, The Winter People, and The Invited. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.
* * *
HILLARY MONAHAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Mary: The Summoning and, under the Eva Darrows name, the critically acclaimed The Awesome and Belly Up. Hillary writes everything from horror and comedy to SFF and romance, for young adult and adult audiences alike. 2020 sees her twelfth novel in print.
* * *
MARY SANGIOVANNI is an award-winning American horror and thriller writer of over a dozen books, including The Hollower trilogy, Thrall, the Kathy Ryan series, and others, as well as numerous short stories and non-fiction. Her work has been translated internationally. She has a Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, Pittsburgh, and is currently a member of The Authors Guild, The International Thriller Writers, and Penn Writers. She is a co-host on the popular podcast The Horror Show with Brian Keene, and hosts her own podcast on cosmic horror, Cosmic Shenanigans. She has the distinction of being one of the first women to speak about writing at the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, and offers talks and workshops on writing around the country. Born and raised in New Jersey, she currently resides in Pennsylvania.
* * *
ANGELA SLATTER is the author of the Verity Fassbinder supernatural crime series (Vigil, Corpselight and Restoration) as well as eight short-story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing. She’s won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar Award, an Australian Shadows Award and six Aurealis Awards; her debut novel was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into French, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian. Her novelette “Finnegan’s Field” has been optioned for film.
