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STEVEN BARNES is the New York Times bestselling author of over thirty novels of science fiction, horror, and suspense. The Image, Endeavor, and Cable-Ace Award winning author also writes for television, including the 1980's The Twilight Zone, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, and an Emmy Award[winning episode of The Outer Limits. He has been Guest of Honor at the world's most prestigious science fiction conventions. Most recently, he wrote for Jordan Peele's The Twilight Zone revival, and Shudder's Horror Noire anthology. Steven was born in Los Angeles, California, and, except for a decade in the Northwest and three years in Atlanta, Georgia, has lived in that area all his life. Steve and his wife, bestselling author Tananarive Due, live with their son Jason in Upland, California. Visit him at www.steven-barnes.com.
Multiple Emmy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated WAYNE BRADY has made his mark on stage and screen as an actor, producer, singer, dancer, songwriter, and television personality. A five-time Emmy winner, Brady has an impressive TV resume including Whose Line Is It Anyway?, How I Met Your Mother, The Masked Singer, Dancing With the Stars, Black Lightning, The Good Fight, and American Gigolo. He's the host and executive producer for Let's Make A Deal. Recently, Brady returned to Broadway in the titular of The Wiz.
POPPY Z. BRITE is the longtime pen name of Billy Martin. Since beginning his career with the small-press magazine The Horror Show in 1985, he has published eight novels, including Lost Souls, Exquisite Corpse, and the Liquor series, as well as several short story collections and assorted nonfiction work. Brite is also the editor of the erotic horror anthologies Love in Vein and Twice Bitten: Love in Vein II. He has recently completed Water if God Wills It, a nonfiction book about religion and spirituality in the works of Stephen King. In addition to writing, he runs the online curio shop PZBaubles New Orleans, specializing in vintage Tarot cards, quirky jewelry, religious objects, and more. He lives in New Orleans with his husband, the artist Grey Cross, and their cats. Some of his work may be found at https://www.patreon.com/docbrite.
An accidental teacher, an accidental librarian, and a purposeful community Afrofuturist, MAURICE BROADDUS has had over a hundred short fiction pieces published in places such as Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Weird Tales, Asimov's, and Uncanny Magazine. Some of his stories have been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His novels include the urban fantasy trilogy The Knights of Breton Court, the award-winning steampunk books Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship, the SF novels Sweep of Stars and Breath of Oblivion, and the middle-grade detective novels, The Usual Suspects and Unfadeable. Learn more about him at MauriceBroaddus.com.
SOMER CANON is the Imadjinn Award winning and Splatterpunk Award nominated author of works such as The Hag Witch of Tripp Creek and You're Mine. When she's not wreaking havoc in her minivan, she's avoiding her neighbors and consuming all things horror. She has two sons and more cats than her husband agreed to have.
ROBERT CARGILL is a Bram Stoker award winning screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted novelist, and former film critic known for his movies Sinister, The Black Phone, and Doctor Strange, as well as his books Sea of Rust, Day Zero, and We Are Where the Nightmares Go. He lives and works in Austin, TX.
NAT CASSIDY writes horror for the page, stage, and screen. His acclaimed novels Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings were featured in best-of lists from Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, NPR, the Chicago Review of Books, the New York Public Library, and more, and he was named one of the "writers shaping horror's next golden age" by Esquire. His award-winning horror plays have been produced throughout New York City, as well as across the country, and he was commissioned to write the libretto for a world premiere short opera at the Kennedy Center (about the end of the world, of course). You've also likely seen Nat on your television, playing various Bad Guys of the Week on shows such as Law & Order: SVU, Blue Bloods, Bull, Quantico, FBI, and many others ... but that's a topic for a different bio. He lives in New York City with his wife. Visit him at www.natcassidy.com.
V. CASTRO is a two-time Bram Stoker Award nominated Mexican American writer from San Antonio, Texas now residing in the UK. She writes horror, erotic horror, and science fiction. Her books include The Haunting of Alejandra, Aliens: Vasquez, Mestiza Blood, The Queen of the Cicadas, Out of Aztlan, Las Posadas, Rebel Moon (the official Netflix film novelization), and Goddess of Filth. Her forthcoming novel is Immortal Pleasures from Del Rey. Connect with Violet via Instagram and Twitter @vlatinalondon or www.vcastrostories.com. She can also be found on Blue Sky, Goodreads, Amazon, and TikTok@vcastrobooks.
RICHARD CHIZMAR is the coauthor (with Stephen King) of the New York Times bestselling novella Gwendy's Button Box and Gwendy's Final Task, and the solo novella Gwendy's Magic Feather. Recent books include Memorials and the New York Times bestsellers Becoming the Boogeyman and Chasing the Boogeyman, The Girl on the Porch, The Long Way Home, his fourth short story collection, and Widow's Point, a chilling tale about a haunted lighthouse cowritten with his son Billy Chizmar, which was recently made into a feature film. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and The Year's 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. He has won two World Fantasy awards, four International Horror Guild awards, and the HWA's Board of Trustees award. Chizmar's work has been translated into more than fifteen languages throughout the world, and he has appeared at numerous conferences as a writing instructor, speaker, panelist, and guest of honor. Follow him on Twitter @RichardChizmar, or visit his website at RichardChizmar.com.
S.A. COSBY is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal, among others. When not writing, he is an avid hiker and chess player.
TANANARIVE DUE is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award-winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount+ and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). Learn more at TananariveDue.com.
MEG GARDINER is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of sixteen novels. Her thrillers have won the Edgar Award and been summer reading picks by The Today Show and O, the Oprah Magazine. In August 2022, Heat 2, co-authored with Michael Mann, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. A former lawyer, two-time president of Mystery Writers of America, and three-time Jeopardy! champion, Gardiner lives in Austin, Texas.
GABINO IGLESIAS is the author of the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker award-winning novel, The Devil Takes you Home, as well as author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, Texas and a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle.
JONATHAN JANZ is a husband, father, author, screenwriter, and public schoolteacher. He's happy now, but when he was fourteen years old, he was lost: no self-esteem, convinced he was intellectually inferior, and slowly withdrawing from the world. Then he picked up a Stephen King novel, coincidentally one of King's least favorites (The Tommyknockers). During that life-altering summer, Stephen King's storytelling healed Jonathan. It showed him that books are a uniquely portable magic and that there are other worlds than these. It also taught him he wasn't unintelligent; he'd simply been reading the wrong books. Over the next three years, he devoured every King tale he could find and loved them all. And when he experienced The Stand as a junior in high school, he decided to write stories of his own. Jonathan remains a passionate Constant Reader to this day and wants to thank Mr. King for changing his life.
ALMA KATSU is the award-winning author of eight novels, including the historical horror novels The Hunger, The Deep, and The Fervor. Her story The Wehrwolf won the Bram Stoker award for long fiction. She also writes spy fiction following a career in intelligence, with the first, Red Widow, named an Editor's Choice by The New York Times and Amazon. Her works have been named a Best Book by NPR, The New York Times, Apple, Amazon, Goodreads, and more. She is a contributing reviewer for The Washington Post. You can find out more at almakatsubooks.com.
CAROLINE KEPNES is the New York Times bestselling author of You, Hidden Bodies, Providence, and You Love Me. Her work has been translated into a multitude of languages and inspired a television series adaptation of You, currently on Netflix. Kepnes graduated from Brown University and then worked as a pop culture journalist for Entertainment Weekly and a TV writer for The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She grew up in Cape Cod, and now lives in Los Angeles.
MICHAEL KORYTA is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former private investigator, his work has been translated into more than 25 languages, nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, and Golden Dagger awards, and adapted into major feature films. He also writes horror novels under the pen name Scott Carson. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and Camden, Maine.
SARAH LANGAN is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her most recent novels are A Better World (April 2024), which the Los Angeles Times called, "A cautionary tale of a family's sacrifice gone wrong and a high-water mark in the career of a novelist who's already won three Bram Stoker Awards," and Good Neighbors (February 2021), which Gabino Iglesias at NPR called, "One of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I've ever read." She's won three Bram Stoker Awards for her fiction. Her previous novels are The Keeper, The Missing, and Audrey's Door. She has an MFA from Columbia University, an MS in Environmental Health Science/ Toxicology from NYU, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer/director JT Petty, their two daughters, and two maniac rabbits.
JOE R. LANSDALE is the author of fifty novels and four hundred shorter works, including stories, essays, reviews, film and TV scripts, introductions and magazine articles, as well as a book of poetry. His work has been made into films, animation, comics, and has won numerous awards, including the Edgar, the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Award, several Bram Stoker Awards, and the Spur Award. His work has been made into films, among them Bubba Ho-Tep, Cold in July, as well as the acclaimed TV show Hap and Leonard. His novel The Thicket is currently being adapted for film. He has also had works adapted for Masters of Horror on Showtime, Netflix's Love Death + Robots, Shudder's Creepshow. He has written scripts for Batman: The Animated Series, and other animated projects. He has received numerous awards and recognition for horror, crime, historical fiction, as well as others. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife Karen and pit bull, RooRoo.
TIM LEBBON is a New York Times bestselling writer from South Wales. He's had almost fifty novels published to date, and hundreds of novellas and short stories. His most recent novel is Among the Living. He has won a World Fantasy Award and four British Fantasy Awards, as well as the Bram Stoker, Scribe, and Dragon Awards. He's recently written for the new computer game Resurgence, worked as lead writer on a major Audible audio drama, and is co-writing his first comic for Dark Horse. The movie of his novel The Silence debuted on Netflix in April 2019, and Pay the Ghost was released Halloween 2015. Tim is currently developing more novels, short stories, audio dramas, and projects for TV and the big screen. Find out more at www.timlebbon.net.
JOSH MALERMAN is a New York Times bestselling author and one of two singer/songwriters for the rock band The High Strung, whose song "The Luck You Got" can be heard as the theme song to the Showtime series Shameless. His book Bird Box was made into a Netflix film of the same name, starring Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich. He has been nominated for eight Bram Stoker Awards and has written 36 books, many of those (14) prior to the publication of Bird Box, his debut. Daphne will be his 11th published book. He lives in Michigan with his fiancee, the artist/musician Allison Laakko.
RONALD MALFI is an award-winning author of several horror novels, mysteries, and thrillers, including the bestseller Come with Me from Titan Books. He is the recipient of two Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award, the Vincent Preis Horror Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Popular Fiction, and his novel Floating Staircase was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres. When he's not writing, he's fronting the rock band VEER.
USMAN T. MALIK is a Pakistani-American writer whose award-winning fiction has been published at Tor.com, Wired, Al-Jazeera, New Voices of Fantasy, and in more than a dozen best of the year anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series. His debut collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan won the 2022 World Fantasy Award and the 2022 Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in Arts (IAFA). Other works of his have been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Nebula Awards. He is the co-founder of The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which, since 2016, has been nurturing Pakistani writers of speculative fiction and magic realism. Malik's debut novel A Dark and Narrow House is slated to be published by Putnam Books in 2026.
PREMEE MOHAMED is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. In 2024, she served as the Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence. She is also an assistant editor at the short audio fiction podcast Escape Pod. Premee is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues, and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.
CYNTHIA PELAYO is a Bram Stoker and International Latino Book Award-winning author and poet. Pelayo writes genre-blending fairy tales that explore grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. Her books include Forgotten Sisters, Children of Chicago, The Shoemaker's Magician, Loteria, Crime Scene, Into the Forest, All the Way Through and more. She was born in Puerto Rico and raised in inner city Chicago, where she lives with her family.
HAILEY PIPER is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, All the Hearts You Eat, A Light Most Hateful, The Worm and His Kings, and other books of horror. She is also the author of over 100 short stories, appearing in Weird Tales, Pseudopod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. Find Hailey at www.haileypiper.com.
DAVID J. SCHOW is a multiple-award-winning American writer, with ten novels, thirteen short story collections, comics (a decade so far with John Carpenter's Storm King imprint), movies (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red), television (Masters of Horror, Mob City, Creepshow), nonfiction (The Outer Limits Companion, The Art of Drew Struzan), and he can be seen on various DVDs as an expert witness or documentarian for over 40 films and television shows. In 2020, Cimarron Street Books embarked on a massive program to reprint all his books in new, refreshed, "remixed" editions including his landmark horror anthology, Silver Scream, as well as a follow-up to his prize-grabbing assembly of Fangoria writing, Wild Hairs, plus brand-new titles such as Monster Movies. His multimedia column "R&D" appears quarterly in barebones magazine. Thanks to him, the word "splatterpunk" has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002. Google him.
ALEX SEGURA is the bestselling and award-winning author of Secret Identity, which The New York Times called "wittily original" and named an Editor's Choice. NPR described the novel as "masterful," and it received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. Secret Identity was also listed as one of the Best Mysteries of the Year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and more, and was nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Hardcover, the Lefty, and Barry Awards for Best Novel, the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. Alex has also written novels and comics featuring iconic characters for Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and more. His next novel, Alter Ego, a follow-up to Secret Identity, arrives in December from Flatiron Books. A Miami native, he lives in New York with his family.
BRYAN SMITH is a two-time Splatterpunk Award-winning author of more than forty horror and crime novels and novellas, including 68 Kill, the cult classic Depraved, and its sequels, The Killing Kind, Slowly We Rot, Last of the Ravagers, and many more. Bestselling horror author Brian Keene called Slowly We Rot "the best zombie novel I've ever read." 68 Kill was adapted into a motion picture starring Matthew Gray Gubler of the long-running CBS series Criminal Minds. 68 Kill won the Midnighters Award at the SXSW film festival in 2017 and was released to wide acclaim, including positive reviews in The New York Times and Bloody Disgusting. Bryan also co-scripted an original Harley Quinn story for the House of Horrors anthology from DC Comics. Follow him on Substack for news about new book releases and more: https://bryansmithhorror.substack.com.
PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the national bestselling author of Horror Movie, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives near Boston with his family.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of over forty books of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including Deathless, Space Opera, The Past is Red, and the Fairyland novels. She is the winner of the Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Lambda awards, among others, and has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy and Ursula K LeGuin awards. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her child and several troublingly large cats.
BEV VINCENT has been writing the column "News from the Dead Zone" for Cemetery Dance magazine for nearly twenty-five years. He is the author of several non-fiction books, including The Road to the Dark Tower, The Dark Tower Companion and Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences. In 2018, he co-edited Flight or Fright with Stephen King, an anthology of scary tales about flying that also includes one of his over 130 published short stories. His script for the "dollar baby" Stephen King's Gotham Café (co-written with two others) was named Best Adaptation at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2004. His work has been translated into over twenty languages and has been nominated for the Stoker (twice), Edgar, Locus, Ignotus, Rondo Hatton Classic Horror and ITW Thriller Awards. To learn more, visit bevvincent.com.
CATRIONA WARD was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Ward is the author of Rawblood, Little Eve, Sundial, The Last House on Needless Street, Looking Glass Sound, and Nowhere Burning. She has been the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, the International Thriller Writers Association Award for Best Novel, and is the first woman to have won the August Derleth Prize for Best Horror Novel three times. She's thrilled to be included in this anthology, and still can't quite believe it.
CHUCK WENDIG is the New York Times bestselling author of Wanderers, The Book of Accidents, Black River Orchard, and over two dozen other books for adults, young adults, and middle grade readers. A finalist for the Astounding Award and an alum of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, he has also written comics, games, and for film and television. He is known for his blog, terribleminds, and books about writing such as Damn Fine Story and Gentle Writing Advice. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his family and a couple of very good dogs.
WRATH JAMES WHITE is a badass motherfucker who writes badass things for other badass motherfuckers. He is the author of such extreme horror classics as The Resurrectionist, Succulent Prey, and its sequel Prey Drive, Yaccub's Curse, 400 Days of Oppression, The Book of a Thousand Sins, His Pain, Population Zero, If You Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse, Hardcore Kelli, and most recently Rabbit Hunt, The Ecstasy Of Agony, and more than two dozen other novels, novellas, short story and poetry collections of extreme and hardcore horror. He has co-written books with Edward Lee, J.F. Gonzalez, Maurice Broaddus, Matt Shaw, and Kristopher Rufty. Wrath lives and works in Austin, Texas.
RIO YOUERS is the British Fantasy and Sunburst Award-nominated author of Lola on Fire and No Second Chances. His 2017 thriller, The Forgotten Girl, was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. He is the writer of Sleeping Beauties, a graphic novel based on the #1 bestseller by Stephen King and Owen King. Rio's latest novel, The Bang-Bang Sisters, was published by William Morrow in Summer 2024.
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CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as The House of Last Resort, All Hallows, Road of Bones, and the Stoker Award-winning Ararat, among many others. Golden co-created (with Mike Mignola) the fan-favorite comic book series Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. He has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and the online animated series Ghosts of Albion (with Amber Benson). His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. He has been nominated eleven times in eight different categories for the Bram Stoker Award, and has won twice. In 2023, Golden and Amber Benson co-wrote and co-directed the Audible Original podcast Slayers: A Buffyverse Story. Please visit him at http://www.christophergolden.com
BRIAN KEENE is the bestselling, multiple-award-winning author of over forty books-mostly horror, fantasy, science-fiction, and nonfiction-as well as over two-hundred short stories and dozens of comic books and graphic novels for Marvel, DC, and others. His first novel, 2003's The Rising, is often credited with renewing pop culture's interest in zombies. He also served as the showrunner for Silverwood: The Door. From 2015 to 2020, he hosted the immensely popular award-winning podcast The Horror Show with Brian Keene. He also serves on the board of directors for the Scares That Care 501c charity organization, which has to date raised over $450,000 for sick children, burn victims, and women battling breast cancer. The father of two sons and one stepdaughter, he lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, author Mary SanGiovanni. The two co-own Vortex Books & Comics-a genre specific brick-and-mortar bookstore.
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STEPHEN KING is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
