Eden Royce's Blog, page 5
February 9, 2017
Day 9: Tlotlo Tsamaase
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Tlotlo Tsamaase hails from Goborone, Botswana. She is a writer of fiction, poetry, and architectural articles and winner of the 2014 Black Crake Books prize.
Her work has appeared in Terraform, An Alphabet of Embers, and The Fog Horn.
“I Will Be Your Grave” was nominated for this year’s Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award in the long poem category after much debate as to if it was “speculative enough.” To me, there is no question that this dark surrealism–with its images of death, graves, and bone–fits into the horror category.
Her poem, “Constellations of You” is a haunting and challenging piece on racial identity and lack of self-love. Tsamaase’s narrator has absorbed the media’s and pop culture’s messages that their skin color and dialect made them less. And ashamed, sought to become more acceptable, even though those long-established standards of language and beauty will never allow that to happen.
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Read her poems “I Will be Your Grave” and “Constellations of You” on Strange Horizons.
Find more of Tlotlo’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.
February 8, 2017
Day 8: Nuzo Onoh
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Nuzo Onoh is a British author from Enugu in the Eastern part of Nigeria, in what was formerly known as the Republic of Biafra. Their civil war with Nigeria, which she experienced firsthand, had an enormous impact on her writing style. In her books The Reluctant Dead and Unhallowed Graves, you get a deep draught of local Nigerian culture and her writing reflects the oral storytelling traditions of the Igbo tribe. Onoh doesn’t shy away from the gritty details when creating trauma to put her characters through.
She states that her goal is to establish African Horror as bona-fide horror subgenre, rather than the general perception of the term as a negative condition of the continent portrayed by the popular media. It is Nuzo’s hope that soon, African Horror will be recognized and enjoyed as other regional horror— Japanese, Korean, and Scandinavian.
Her latest release, The Sleepless is her first novel. Buy it here. (Beware, if you are put off by injury to animals, skip the first few pages.) Her other works, The Reluctant Dead and Unhallowed Graves, are short story collections steeped in actual practices and chronicle the divergent lifestyles–all dread-inducing–of characters in Nigeria.
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Onoh publishes her work on June 28th so her readers will always know when to expect more from her. For more information about Nuzo, please visit her website and follow her on Twitter.
February 7, 2017
Day 7: Tananarive Due
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Tananarive Due was born in Tallahassee, Florida is a recipient of The American Book Award (for The Living Blood), NAACP Image Award (for the In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel, with Blair Underwood and Steven Barnes), and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award (for the short story collection Ghost Summer).
Due was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for The Between (Superior Achievement in a First Novel) and My Soul to Keep (Best Novel). Due, author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir, was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University in 2010.
Danger Word, a short horror film funded by a successful crowdfunding venture, is based on the post-apocalyptic sci-fi short story of the same name by Due and husband Steven Barnes. The short story has also sparked full length YA horror novels Devil’s Wake and Domino Falls.
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Featuring an award-winning novella and fifteen stories—one of which has never been published before— her first short story collection, Ghost Summer is a must read. Keep up with Tananarive on her website, her mailing list, and on Twitter.
February 6, 2017
Day 6: Pheare Alexander
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Pheare Alexander says most of her life has been spent reading and thus writing her own tales soon followed. Her writings focus on horrific tales of murder, fantasy, morality and exploration into the decay of the human mind.
Her contemporary psychological horror novel, Str8laced asks the question:
Who do you live your life for?
Successful child psychiatrist Dr. Jocelyn Reynolds is abducted and kept in a one-room dungeon, where this question is posted to her by McClaine Henry, a woman suffering from severe psychosis. Henry, a seasoned serial killer, proclaims to want therapy to change her life and Dr. Reynolds is only one she trusts.
But Reynolds is pregnant and that changes the game…
Alexander’s writing is tense and taut, mirroring the emotional and physical torture Dr. Reynolds endures from the sadistic Henry.
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Buy Str8laced on Amazon here. You can connect with Pheare Alexander on Twitter.
February 5, 2017
Day 5: Zin E. Rocklyn
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Zin E. Rocklyn hails from Jersey City, New Jersey and is of Trinidadian descent. As such, she says she’s always been surrounded by the spine-tingling tales of ghost children, devilishly handsome men, and mysterious, lost spirits, all looking for your soul when you’re a little too careless.
Her immersion in these tales have made her stories older and deeper than her years, much like the name she’s chosen to pen them under. Zin passes the time daydreaming, reading, and thinking up new ways to creep her most loved ones out.
Her short story “Need” is in the Colors in Darkness anthology Forever Vacancy, and is a visceral tale of an ageless being who gives two mysterious men checking in to the Kretcher motel more than they bargained for when they attempt to possess her.
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Her short story “Summer Skin” is in the upcoming Sycorax’s Daughters, an anthology of black women horror fiction and poetry. Some of her other short works can be found on the blog Oblique in 30: Tests from the Deck.
Find Zin on Facebook and on Twitter.
February 4, 2017
Day 4: Linda D. Addison
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Linda D. Addison is a poet and writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy currently living in Arizona. In 2001, she became the first African-American to win the HWA Bram Stoker award® for superior achievement in poetry for Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes. She has since won the award three additional times, including one for her poetry and short story collection How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend (2011).
Addison has also published over 300 poems, stories, and articles for such publications as Essence Magazine and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Ms. Addison is a founding member of the writer’s group, Circles in the Hair (1990) and is the poetry editor for Space & Time Magazine.
She is also one of the editors for Sycorax’s Daughters, an anthology of horror fiction and poetry written by black women.
In her collection How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend, her poetry is moody and melodic; the meter weaves a dimly lit path and you feel compelled to follow. The verse itself is seductive, almost playful—the picture of elegant disturbia. The prose included in the book is a combination of sub-genres, and you get a taste of homespun magic along with science fiction-laced Gothic horror. Buy it here.
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For more information about Linda, such as her full bibliography and schedule of events, please visit her website or follow her on Twitter.
February 3, 2017
Day 3: Ann Petry
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Ann Lane Petry’s birth date is not certain. Some biographers state October 12, 1911, while others list it as October 12, 1908. Either way, she was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, a predominantly white, rural community. Her family often told stories while she was growing up, and Petry began writing short stories and plays while she was still in high school.
The Street is her most famous novel, published in 1946; it made her the first black woman writer with book sales over a million copies.
As Petry is considered one of the most successful members of the “Richard Wright school” of writing, some overlook the Gothic–the dark and macabre–tones in her writing. In Keith Clark‘s book, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), Clark compares Petry’s work to Poe’s, saying she has brought the symbolism of classic Gothic into the 1940s. The tenement building becomes a haunted castle, filled with beings bent on destruction. Imagery of darkness, seclusion, entombment, and insanity pervade the work. Even the physical descriptions of characters, both black and white, are monstrous, draping Lutie’s (our main character’s) every move in fear.
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Clark goes on to note the use of dark comedy and the macabre in Petry’s short stories “The Bones of Louella Brown,” a ghost story in which a maid comes back to haunt her employers and “The Witness,” in which a teacher is forced to witness a crime committed by his students.
Over the course of her life, Petry lectured widely throughout the United States, and her contribution to literature was acknowledged by membership in the Author’s Guild and other literary societies, and honorary doctorates from several colleges and universities.
Ann Petry died April 28, 1997, near her home in Old Saybrook, after a brief illness.
The Street and Miss Muriel and Other Stories are available on Amazon.
February 2, 2017
Day 2: Jemiah Jefferson
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Jemiah Jefferson was born in Denver, Colorado. Now living in southeast Portland, Oregon, she works in the editorial department at Dark Horse Comics, Inc. and is a regular contributor to Popshifter.com.
Jefferson started writing fiction at the age of twelve, always with the goal of writing the material she wants to see but that doesn’t yet exist. According to her website, the first draft of the novel that would become Voice of the Blood was written in 24 hours in 1990 in a fit of inspiration.
After another six years (and several more novels and short stories) she took her experiences of living in San Francisco and of her contacts with the young, amoral, and beautiful that she had there and applied them to situations and characters already in existence in her imagination, fueling the creation of an extended vampire “family.” This led her to four novels–Voice (originally titled Vox Sanguinus), Wounds, Fiend, and A Drop of Scarlet.
In addition to detailing the fascinations and desires of this “family,” Jefferson’s novels move from 19th Century Europe to modern-day US to reflect the paranoia and possibility surrounding 9/11 and the concept of “art crime.” The books have been compiled into an omnibus edition.
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Jefferson has announced on her Facebook page that her novel, Mixtape for the Apocalypse will be pulled from publication shortly. If you can, grab a copy before then. If you already have one, hold on to it.
You can find Jemiah on Facebook, Twitter, and on her website.
February 1, 2017
Sycorax’s Daughters: A Release and an Appearance
Sycorax’s Daughters the Horror Anthology of fiction & poetry by African-American women, edited by Kinitra Brooks, PhD, Linda D. Addison & Susana Morris, PhD is coming February 2017 from Cedar Grove Books.
In June 2015, editors Brooks and Addison contacted African-American women authors–including me–and poets based on their creative talents in writing about women, race, sexuality, and/or speculative fictions, asking them to consider the vast possibilities that interweaving black women and horror can express.
Brooks, Addison, and Morris are of the contention that peoples of the African diaspora encounter elements of horror on a weekly or even daily basis. Each week, millions of black folks go to church or religious practice and are possessed by the Holy Ghost or ridden by the orishas and loas—what is this if not an Africanized manifestation of spirit possession, a common horror trope?
Sycorax’s Daughters is an opening salvo of what is hoped to be a burgeoning field of black women’s creative horror fiction. There are also plans for a companion volume of new critical horror scholarship by black feminist scholars.
Thought provoking, powerful, and revealing, this anthology is comprised of 28 dark stories and 14 poems written by African American women writers. Tales of what scares, threatens, and shocks them will enlighten and entertain readers. The works delve into demons and shape shifters from the historical to far future imaginings. These pieces cover vampires, ghosts, and mermaids, as well as the unexpected price paid by women struggling for freedom and validation in the past.
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Contributors include: Tiffany Austin, Tracey Baptiste, Regina N. Bradley, Patricia E. Canterbury, Crystal Connor, Joy M. Copeland, Amber Doe, Tish Jackson, Valjeanne Jeffers, Tenea D. Johnson, R. J. Joseph, A. D. Koboah, Nicole Givens Kurtz, Kai Leakes, A. J. Locke, Carole McDonnell, Dana T. McKnight, LH Moore, L. Penelope, Zin E. Rocklyn, Eden Royce, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Andrea Vocab Sanderson, Nicole D. Sconiers, Cherene Sherrard, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, Sheree Renée Thomas, Lori Titus, Tanesha Nicole Tyler, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, L. Marie Wood, K. Ceres Wright, Deana Zhollis
Sycorax’s Daughters is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Several in person events are planned for this important release, including the book’s debut at Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on February 25th from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. I’ll be there, along with many of the other authors and editors to sign books and speak about the project.
Day 1: Helen Oyeyemi
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Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984, moved to London with her family at age four. She wrote her first novel while at school studying for her A-levels. For those of us from the US, that’s sort of like study for the SAT in order to be considered for entrance into a college or university. Also while still at school, she got a publishing deal and The Icarus Girl, a ghost story about an eight-year-old girl torn between her British and Nigerian identity, hit the shelves.
Her third novel, White is for Witching–described as having “roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe”–was a Shirley Jackson Award Finalist and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Set in Dover off the South East coast of England, the Silver family house has been home to four generations of women, weaving threads that bind them cross time, space, and death. I loved the points of view in this book–the teenage Miranda’s, her twin brother Eliot’s, and yes…the house itself has it’s own voice.
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Readers are divided about White is for Witching, because it is a bold work. Oyeyemi trusts the reader to be able to follow along without explaining every move, every shift she makes in this Gothic tale. It has subtlety, it has a bite that you might not feel until the welt raises on your skin hours later.
Like much of Oyeyemi’s work, White is for Witching is a commentary on beauty, horror, nationality, and race. Her novel Boy, Snow, Bird is an inventive take on the Snow White and Cinderella fairy tales. Her latest release is a collection of short stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, which is on my to-read list.
Since 2014 Oyeyemi has lived in Prague. Find out more about her work on her website.
