Horror Writing 2025

Jessica Johns is a queer nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. Her debut novel, Bad Cree, was shortlisted for the Amazon first novel award, was a Canada Reads finalist, and won the WGA Fiction Prize.

Shane Hawk, a member of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is a history teacher by day and a horror writer by night. Hawk’s literary contributions include his debut story collection, Anoka, as well as short fiction featured in numerous anthologies. He co-edited the Bram Stoker, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthology Never Whistle at Night, which reached its tenth printing just one month after publication. He has co-written an Indigenous Horror stage play with Andrea L. Rogers, titled The Land Has Spoken, set to premiere in October 2024 and tour the country the following year. Hawk resides in San Diego, California with his beautiful wife and daughter. 

Cherie Dimaline is an internationally bestselling author. Her 2017 book The Marrow Thieves was named by TIME magazine, one of the Best YA Books of All Time and won the Governor General’s Award and the Kirkus Prize. Her novel Empire of Wild became an instant Canadian bestseller, was named Indigo's 2019 Best Book and is being adapted into an opera. Hunting By Stars was a 2022 American Indian Library Association Honor Book and her new novel VENCO debuted at #1 on Canadian bestseller lists. Other 2023 titles include Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, Anthology of Monsters and Into the Bright Open. Cherie lives in her Georgian Bay Métis Community and writes/produces for screen and stage.

Catharine Chen is the editor of Arsenal Pulp Press, a small publisher located in Vancouver, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, that has twice won the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year award. Now in its 54th year, Arsenal publishes literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; LGBTQ2S+ and BIPOC voices; social issues and gender studies; graphic novels and non-fiction; children’s and young adult lit; and books in translation. Born and raised in Vancouver, Catharine earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia before moving to Toronto to pursue a career in publishing. She is currently writing a short fiction collection, and she has done freelance work for Playwrights Theatre Centre, the Vancouver Writers Fest, HarperCollins Canada, Dundurn Press, Inhabit Media and Education, and Wattpad Books.