Terri Windling is a writer, editor, artist, and folklorist specializing in myth and fantasy. She has published over forty books, receiving ten World Fantasy Awards (including the Life Achievement Award in 2022), plus the Mythopoeic, Bram Stoker, and SFWA Solstice Awards. She has edited fantasy fiction since the 1980s, working with many of the major writers in the field, and co-edited the Years Best Fantasy & Horror anthologies with Ellen Datlow for sixteen years. She also writes fiction for adults and children (The Wood Wife, The Color of Angels, A Midsummer Night’s Faery Tale, etc.), and nonfiction on folklore, fairy tales, and myth. She delivered the fourth annual Tolkien Lecture at Oxford University (2016); has been involved with the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow since its founding in 2020; was on the Advisory Board for a major exhibition on fantasy at the British Library in London (2023 - 2024); and will be a Guest of Honour at the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow (2024). A former New Yorker, she now now lives in a village full of artists in Devon, England.
Lisa Kröger is a horror writer, podcaster, and short film producer. Her book Monster, She Wrote won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction and the Locus Award for Best Nonfiction. Her books have been written about in Time magazine, The New York Times, Book Page, and Rue Morgue, among others. Following the success of Monster, She Wrote, Valancourt Books launched a Monster, She Wrote book series, which now includes five titles. Her newest book is Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult.
Craig Laurance Gidney writes both contemporary and genre fiction. He is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013) and A Spectral Hue (Word Horde, 2019).
Melanie R. Anderson is an associate professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She teaches American literature, and her research interests tend toward supernatural fiction. She co-authored with Lisa Kröger Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult (2022) and the Bram Stoker and Locus award-winning Monster, She Wrote (2019). She is the author of the academic book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison, which won the 2014 South Central MLA Book Prize. She has co-edited three scholarly essay collections: The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013), Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016), and Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House (2020). She also co-hosts two podcasts about horror: The Know Fear Cast and The Monster, She Wrote Podcast.
Essential Dreams Press is a genre-leaning press with a passion for social justice and creative exploration and a belief that the actions of a few can have a far-reaching impact for both good and ill.
The Outer Dark Collective fosters conversation about Weird Fiction and connects communities among a diverse slate of creators in the umbrella of speculative fiction--inclusive, safe and welcoming to women, LBGTQ+, and writers of color. Listen to The Outer Dark podcast on This Is Horror here.