It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

About

Joe Vallese is Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb Vice Backstage PopMatters Southeast Review and North American Review among other publications. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and named a Notable in The Best American Essays. He is coeditor of the anthology Whats Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey (Word Riot Press). He holds an MFA from NYU and MAT and BA degrees from Bard College. Kirsty Logans latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker 2023) a queer medieval witch revenge quest. Forthcoming is The Unfamiliar (Virago 2023) a memoir of queer pregnancy and parenthood. She is also the author of two novels three story collections two chapbooks a short memoir a 10-hour audio play for Audible and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. Her books have won the Lambda Polari Saboteur Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV adapted for stage recorded for radio and podcasts exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the best-selling memoir In the Dream House. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Samuel Autman writes at the intersections of identity place and pop culture. His essays have appeared in Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays The St. Louis Anthology Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America and numerous literary magazines. He teaches creative writing at DePauw University. www.samuelautman.com Jen Corrigan is a prose writer who lives in Iowa. Their writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner Catapult Literary Hub Salon and elsewhere. They are currently working on a novel. Viet Dinh was born in Vietnam and grew up in Colorado. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston and currently teaches at the University of Delaware. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Division of the Arts as well as two O. Henry Awards and the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story Witness Fence Five Points Chicago Review Threepenny Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. His debut novel After Disasters a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize was released in 2016. He is still wary of summer camps. Jude Ellison S. Doyle is the author of Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate Mock and Fear . . . and Why (Melville House 2016) and Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power (Melville House 2019) the latter being named one of Kirkus Reviewss Best Non-Fiction Books of 2019. Maw his horror comic series from BOOM! Studios debuted in September 2021. Ryan Dzelzkalns has poems appearing with Assaracus DIAGRAM The Offing the Shanghai Literary Review Tin House and others. He received an MFA from New York University and a BA from Macalester College where he was awarded the Wendy Parrish Poetry Prize. He was recently a Fulbright scholar in Tokyo where he still lives. www.RyanDz.com Sarah Fonesca is a self-taught writer from the Georgia foothills who lives in New York City. Her fiction and cinema writing have appeared in Bosie Evergreen Review Leste Magazine the Los Angeles Review of Books Museum of the Moving Images Reverse Shot and others. She is a coeditor of The New Lesbian Pulp forthcoming from Feminist Press. Bruce Owens Grimm is a Pushcart-nominated queer ghost-nerd based in Chicago. He is a coeditor of Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus Brevitys Nonfiction Blog Sweet: A Literary Confection Entropy AWPs Writers Notebook Iron Horse Literary Review Older Queer Voices Ghost City Review and elsewhere. He attended the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop as well as residencies and workshops at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) among others. @bruceowensgrimm Richard Scott Larson earned his MFA from New York University and he is the recent recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His creative and critical work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Chicago Review of Books Harvard Review Colorado Review Electric Literature and elsewhere. His writing has also been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and he is an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. Jonathan Robbins Leon identifies as a queer author of memoir and fiction. His work has been published by Flame Tree Press Dark Moon Digest and Distant Shore Publishing. He regards himself as a Shirley Jackson enthusiast and decent Bette Davis impersonator. He and his husband Nick are caretakers of a haunted house and fathers to a super villain. Tucker Lieberman is the author of very trans nonfiction books - Painting Dragons Bad Fire and Ten Past Noon - and a bilingual poetry collection Enkidu Is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está. Among the anthologies to which he has contributed Lambda Literary has recognized Balancing on the Mechitza (2011 winner) Letters For My Brothers (2012 finalist) and Trans-Galactic Bike Ride (2021 finalist). Tucker is frightened by pumpkin spice lattes which is not to say he would never drink one since things that are frightening are sometimes good. Previously he worked for a decade for an investment company and this was mostly not scary. Originally from Boston he now haunts Bogotá Colombia with his husband Arturo Serrano where they scheme about how to publish their novels. www.tuckerlieberman.com Zefyr Lisowski is a trans and queer writer artist three-time Pushcart nominee and North Carolinian currently living in NYC. Shes a Poetry Coeditor for Apogee and the author of Blood Box winner of the Black River Editors Choice Award from Black Lawrence Press and released in fall 2019; shes also the author of the microchap Wolf Inventory (Ghost City Press 2018) and a 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop Fellow. Zefyrs work has appeared in Literary Hub Nat. Brut. Muzzle Magazine and DIAGRAM among many other places. Shes also received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts McGill University the New York Live Ideas Fest the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts and the 2019 CUNY Graduate Center Adjunct Incubator Grant. Laura Maw is a writer of essays and arts criticism. Her work has been published in the New Statesman the White Review the Los Angeles Review of Books Hazlitt Electric Literature and Literary Hub among others. Carrow Narby is a hobbyist writer based on the north shore of Massachusetts. Their essays and fiction have appeared in Bitch The Toast The Establishment PodCastle and Glittership. They also contributed a piece of fabricated scholarship to The Anthology of Babel published in 2020 by Punctum Books. Sachiko Ragosta (they/them) is a Bay Areabased speculative fiction writer sexual and reproductive health researcher and sex educator. As a nonbinary mixed-race second generation Japanese American writer they use fiction to examine the resilience and resolve born out of nonbelonging. They are the author of the chapbook The Mythology of Blood and Boyhood available on their website sachikor.com and are currently working with Intergalactic Gaysians a group of Queer and Trans Asian and Pacific Islander (QTAPI) writers to publish an anthology of QTAPI speculative fiction. Sumiko Saulson is an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror. Ze is the editor of the anthologies and collections Black Magic Women Scry of Lust Black Celebration and Wickedly Abled. Ze is the winner of the 2016 HWA StokerCon Scholarship from Hell 2017 BCC Voice Reframing the Other contest 2017 Mixy Award and the 2018 AWW Afrosurrealist Writer Award and is a 2020 HWA Diversity Grant recipient. Ze has an AA in English from Berkeley City College and writes a column called 'Writing While Black' for the San Francisco BayView a national Black newspaper. Ze is the host of the SOMA Leather and LGBT Cultural Districts Erotic Storytelling Hour and Social Media Manager at the Horror Writers Association. Prince Shakur is an award-winning queer Jamaican American writer organiser and podcast host living in Columbus Ohio. His journalism and nonfiction have appeared in Teen Vogue Vice Level and more on social movements black resilience in the face of iconography and queer culture. His memoir When They Tell You to Be Good is forthcoming from Tin House Books. Bishakh Som is an Indian American trans femme visual artist and author. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker Autostraddle Were Still Here Beyond vol. 2 The Strumpet the Boston Review Black Warrior Review Vice the Brooklyn Rail Buzzfeed Ink Brick the Huffington Post The Graphic Canon vol. 3 and Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream. She received the Xeric grant in 2003 for her comics collection Angel. Her graphic novel Apsara Engine (Feminist Press) is the winner of a 2021 L.A. Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Will Stockton teaches English in Clemson South Carolina. His essays have appeared in Hotel America Broad Street and Bennington Review. Grant Sutton writes and practices acupuncture in New Orleans Louisiana. Tosha R. Taylor is a lecturer in Languages Literature and Writing at Manhattanville College in New York. Her academic research predominantly concerns abjection and extreme violence and sexuality in horror media as does her creative work. Recently published works include studies of horror memes post-object fandoms womens horror filmmaking queer horror and performative masculinity in rock music. She holds a PhD from Loughborough University. S. Trimble is a writer and teacher from Toronto Ontario. Shes written on pop culture for The ROM Magazine and Bitch Media and her book on visions of the end times Undead Ends: Stories of Apocalypse is available from Rutgers University Press. Trimble teaches courses on pop culture and writing at the University of Torontos Women and Gender Studies Institute. Shes a puppy parent NBA nerd and fan of all things monstrous and ghostly. Steffan Triplett is a poet and essayist from Joplin Missouri. His essays have appeared in Electric Literature Longreads Literary Hub Vulture and Iowa Review. Steffans work has been anthologized in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat 2018) Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2019) and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America (Belt Publishing 2021). Steffan has been a fellow for Callaloo and Lambda Literary and is a VONA/Voices alumnus. He currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh where he is the interim Assistant Director for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Addie Tsai (any/all) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Womans University. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin. Unwieldy Creatures their adult queer biracial retelling of Frankenstein is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press. They are the Fiction Coeditor at Anomaly Staff Writer at Spectrum South and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy. Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review 2017) and has work featured in Muzzle PANK Apogee and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She received her MFA in creative writing at Rutgers UniversityNewark and is currently a PhD student in poetics at the University at Buffalo. Her film work has screened at Fotofocus Biennial and the Milwaukee LGBT Film Festival. She tweets @burritotheif.