Jenni Fagan is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. She is published in eight languages, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist (once in a decade accolade) winner of Scottish Author of the Year, and on lists including IMPAC, James Tait Black, BBC Short Story Prize, Sunday Times Short Story, Encore, Desmond Elliott among others. Currently completing two novels set in Edinburgh, theatre and film adaptations for her first novel and her new poetry collection There’s a Witch in the Word Machine, comes out in Sep 2018.
Kurt Fawver is writer of horror, weird fiction, and literature that oozes through the cracks of genre. His short fiction has previously appeared in venues such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Aeons, Weird Tales, Vastarien, and Gamut. His work has been chosen for inclusion in Best New Horror and Year’s Best Weird Fiction and has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Kurt has released two collections of short stories: Forever, in Pieces, and The Dissolution of Small Worlds, as well as one novella, Burning Witches, Burning Angels. He’s also had non-fiction published in journals such as Thinking Horror and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He lives in the apocalypse that’s known as “Florida” and dreams of days touched by snow. He wishes you delightful nightmares and magical waking hours.
Brenna Gomez was the recipient of a 2017 Hedgebrook residency. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and StoryQuarterly. She received her MFA from the University of New Mexico, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of Blue Mesa Review and the 2015 recipient of the Hispanic Writer Award for the UNM Summer Writers’ Conference in Santa Fe. Brenna is a reader for Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading. She currently teaches composition at UNM and hosts author events at Bookworks Albuquerque.
Camilla Grudova studied literature and art history at McGill University. Her collection of short stories, The Doll’s Alphabet was released in 2017. Her stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta. She is currently working on a novel and lives in Scotland.
Kathleen Kayembe is the Octavia E. Butler Scholar from Clarion’s class of 2016, with short stories in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and several Best of the Year anthologies for 2017, as well as an essay in the Hugo-nominated anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler. Her work additionally appeared on the SFWA and Locus Recommended Reading Lists for 2017. She co-hosts the weekly writing podcast Write Pack Radio, runs Amherst Writers and Artists writing workshops, and, under the pen name Kaseka Nvita, writes queer romances. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with a beloved collection of fountain pens, inks, and notebooks, and never enough time to write—or read—all that she wants
Michael Kelly is the editor of Shadows & Tall Trees, and Series Editor of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Weird Fiction Review, and others. As editor he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.
Joshua King is a writer and illustrator from the UK, who currently lives in London. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University, New York and has had short stories published in BlazeVOX journal and The Matador Review. His nonfiction has appeared in London’s Litro magazine and Texas’ Newfound Journal. As well as fiction, he also writes plays, which have been performed at various venues in London, and comics about monkeys and science. His writing usually centres around the isolation of rural life and the ways in which people’s beliefs and deeply-held worldviews can lead them astray. It is his great pleasure to appear in the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 5.
Rebecca Kuder’s stories and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Shadows And Tall Trees 7, Resurrection House XIII, Tiferet Journal, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. Her story “The Only Flower That Matters” is forthcoming in The Book of Flowers, an anthology from Egaeus Press; “Rabbit, Cat, Girl” was included in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol 3. For creative nonfiction, she received an Ohio Arts Council individual excellence award. Rebecca toils to put the inner critic in its place by leading creativity workshops and teaching creative writing at The Modern College of Design. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her husband, the writer Robert Freeman Wexler, and their daughter.
Alison Littlewood’s latest novel is The Crow Garden, a tale of obsession set amidst Victorian asylums and séance rooms. Her other novels include The Hidden People, Path of Needles, The Unquiet House and A Cold Season, which was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club. Her short stories have been picked for several ‘Year’s Best’ anthology series and have been gathered together in her collections Quieter Paths and Five Feathered Tales. She won the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction. Alison says, “’The Entertainment Arrives’ was written for an anthology celebrating the work of Ramsey Campbell, and I’d like to thank Ramsey for allowing me to use elements of the world he created in his story, ‘The Entertainment.’” Alison lives with her partner Fergus in Yorkshire, England, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls. You can visit her at http://www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk
Ben Loory is the author of the collections Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day and Tales of Falling and Flying, both from Penguin. His fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, Weekly Reader’s READ Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review, been anthologized in The New Voices of Fantasy and Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade, and been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts. He is also the author of a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus. Loory lives in Los Angeles and teaches short story writing at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
Helen Marshall is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She is also the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy there. Her short stories have won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her debut novel The Migration will be released by Random House Canada in February 2019.
Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). Among his other publications: The Ballad of Martin B, a punk-inspired novella; three novels—The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; The Giulio Metaphysics III, a hybrid linked short stories-novel wherein a character named Giulio attempts to escape from his creator; and Torp: The Landlord, The Husband, The Wife and The Lover, a ménage-a-trois mystery set in 1970 Vancouver during the War Measures Act. 2017 saw the publication of the magic realist short story collection The Photographer in Search of Death (Exile Editions). The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and “The Sand Flea” was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Born in Italy, raised in Montreal, Michael lives in Oakville, Ontario. For more, visit his website: www.michaelmirolla.com
Ian Muneshwar is a Boston-based writer and teacher. He holds an MFA from North
Carolina State University, and his fiction appears in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Liminal Stories, Gamut, and The Dark. In his short fiction, Ian is interested in arthropods, queerbrown subjectivities, and the uncanny, among other things. You can find out more about his work at ianmuneshwar.com
David Peak is the author of the black metal horror novel Corpsepaint (Word Horde, 2018), as well as Eyes in the Dust (Dunhams Manor, 2016), The Spectacle of the Void (Schism, 2014), and The River Through the Trees (Blood Bound Books, 2013). His writing has been published in Denver Quarterly, the Collagist, Electric Literature, 3:AM, and Black Sun Lit. He lives in Chicago.
KL Pereira’s debut short fiction collection, ‘A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality’ was published in 2017 by Cutlass Press. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in Lit Hub, LampLight, The Drum, Shimmer, Innsmouth Free Press, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, Bitch, and other publications. She’s a member of the New England Horror Writers Association and has taught creative writing in high schools, libraries, domestic violence shelters, colleges and universities, and writing institutions throughout New England for over ten years. Find her online @_klpereira and www.klpereira.com.
Eric Schaller’s debut collection of dark fiction, Meet Me in the Middle of the Air, was released in 2016 from Undertow Publications. His stories have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Fantasy: Best of the Year, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Wilde Stories, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and The Dark. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and an editor, with Matthew Cheney, of the on-line magazine The Revelator www.revelatormagazine.com
Robert Shearman has written five short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. He began his career in the theatre, and was resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough; his plays have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. A regular writer for BBC Radio, his own interactive drama series The Chain Gang has won two Sony Awards. But he is probably best known for his work on Doctor Who, bringing back the Daleks for the BAFTA winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award. His latest book, We All Hear Stories in the Dark is to be released by PS Publishing next year.
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book Awards and is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. He is currently a member of the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside of Boston with his family.
Aron Wiesenfeld’s artwork has been the subject of eight solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, and has been a part of over 50 group shows. Among the publications his work has appeared are Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, Art In America, and The Huffington Post. His work has been in a number of museum shows, including The Long Beach Museum of Art, Bakersfield Museum of Art, and The Museum Casa Dell’Architettura in Italy. His paintings have been used for covers on dozens of books of poetry, including “The Other Sky,” a collaborative book project with poet Bruce Bond. In 2014 a large monograph of his work titled “The Well” was published by IDW Press. He was recently named one of the top 100 figurative painters by Buzzfeed. Aron was born in 1972. He attended Cooper Union School of Art in New York, and Art Center College of Design in California. Four of his solo exhibitions have been at Arcadia Contemporary, and the gallery continues to represent his work.
Chavisa Woods is the author of three books of fiction, Things to Do when You’re Goth in the Country, The Albino Album, (both released by Seven Stories Press), and Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind (Fly by Night Press/ Autonomedia/Unbearables). Woods has been a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and was the recipient of the Kathy Acker Award in Writing, the Cobalt Prize for Fiction, the Jerome Foundation Award for Emerging Authors (2009), and was a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for fiction. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, The Evergreen Review, New York Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Full Stop Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, Quaint, and many others. Woods has appeared as a featured author at such notable venues as The Whitney Museum of American Art, City Lights Bookstore, Town Hall Seattle, The Brecht Forum, The Cervantes Institute, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project.
Alligator Tree Graphics (www.alligatortreegraphics.com) is run by writer and designer Robert Freeman Wexler.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“The Convexity of Our Youth” by Kurt Fawver. First published in First published in Looming Low, Sam Cowan & Justin Steele, eds.
“The Rock Eater” by Ben Loory. First published in Tales of Falling and Flying.
“Corzo” by Brenna Gomez. First published in Prairie Schooner Volume 91, Number 1, Spring 2017.
“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe. First published in Nightmare Magazine #54.
“Flotsam” by Daniel Carpenter. First published in Tales from the Shadow Booth #1, Dan Coxon, ed.
“The Possession” by Michael Mirolla. First published in The Photographer in Search of Death.
“Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango” by Ian Muneshwar. First published in The Dark #27.
“The Unwish” by Claire Dean. First published in The Unwish.
“Worship Only What She Bleeds” by Kristi DeMeester. First published in Everything That’s Underneath.
“House of Abjection” by David Peak. First published in Nightscript III, C.M. Muller, ed.
“The Way She is With Strangers” by Helen Marshall. First published in Dark Cities, Christopher Golden, ed.
“The Anteater” by Joshua King. First published in The Matador Review, Fall 2017.
“When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water” by Jenni Fagan. First published in Somesuch Stories, 2017.
“The Entertainment Arrives” by Alison Littlewood. First published in Darker Companions, Scott David Aniolowski & Joseph S. Pulver Sr., eds. “Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street” by Chavisa Woods. First published in Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country. “Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado. First published in Gulf Coast #29.2.
“Red Hood” by Eric Schaller. First published in Nightmare Magazine #55. “Curb Day” by Rebecca Kuder. First published in Shadows and Tall Trees, Vol. 7, Michael Kelly, ed.
“The Narrow Escape of Zipper-Girl” by Adam-Troy Castro. First published in Nightmare Magazine #57.
“Disappearer” by K.L. Pereira. First published in A Dream Between Two Rivers.
“The Mouse Queen” by Camilla Grudova. First published in The Doll’s Alphabet.
“The Second Door” by Brian Evenson. First published in Looming Low, Sam Cowan & Justin Steele, eds.
“Live Through This” by Nadia Bulkin. First published in Looming Low, Sam Cowan & Justin Steele, eds.
“Something About Birds” by Paul Tremblay. First published in Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Ellen Datlow, ed
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 39
