Julia Aloi is a writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is currently an undergraduate student at Lehigh University, majoring in English and Biology. Her work has been published in Balloons Lit. Journal, Up North Lit, LandLocked Magazine, and Sheepshead Review.
Destiny Bonilla is currently pursuing her MA in Literature at Lehigh University where she also received her Bachelors in English with minors in marketing and creative writing. Although her field of interest typically revolves around the relationship between cultural identity and poetry, she is fascinated by visual media and film analysis.
Taylor Cole is a recent graduate student from Lehigh University, and she currently resides in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is a high school English teacher who, in her free time, enjoys film critique and analysis.
Elizabeth Erwin is a PhD candidate in English at Lehigh University and an academic librarian. She has written extensively on horror film and popular culture and is co-creator of Horror Homeroom (with Dawn Keetley and Gwen Hofmann). She is co-editor (with Dawn Keetley) of The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics (McFarland, 2018) and she is currently developing a new podcast series that considers the intersection of historical memory and nostalgia through the lens of classic television. You can (sometimes) find her on Twitter.
Brian Fanelli fell in love with horror movies the first time he watched Universal monster movies and 80s slashers as a kid with his dad. He writes regularly about the genre for Signal Horizon Magazine and HorrorBuzz.com, and he has contributed essays on genre films for Horror Homeroom and Schuylkill Valley Journal. His creative writing has been published in World Literature Today, Paterson Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books), won the Devil’s Kitchen Poetry Prize. Brian has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Lackawanna College and a member of the Horror Writers Association.
Rebecca Gibson is a Gothic researcher and academic who recently passed her viva at Lancaster University. Her thesis is titled “Uncanny Incisions: Plastic Surgery in the Gothic Mode.” She has recent publications in Gothic Nature. Her research interests include body Gothic, the medical humanities, ecoGothic, gender studies, and queerness. Her Twitter handle is @face_of_gothic.
By day, Kelly Gredner can be found fawning over cats and dogs as a Registered Veterinary Technician, but once she clocks out she turns into a wild, dark-haired maven of the night! As a horror fan for 25 years, Kelly enjoys all sorts of macabre and wondrous horror creations. She can be found with a cup of black coffee, or a beer, in front of her TV watching horror movies. Kelly has written for Grim Magazine, Morbidly Beautiful, Ghouls Magazine, and also has a monthly horror podcast, I Spit on Your Podcast, where she with her co-host analyzes horror movies from a semi-academic perspective. She can be found on Twitter @KGredner.
Colby D. Johnson is a second year Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. They specialize in Representation within Early Modern Drama, Gender and Queer Studies, John Milton, and Horror film, namely the Slasher and Paranormal genres. Their work in Horror film seeks to explore the intersections between Early Modern Drama and Modern-day Horror Cinema.
Dawn Keetley is professor of English, teaching horror and the gothic, at Lehigh University. She is author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press, 2020), and coeditor (with Angela Tenga) of Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016), and (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) of The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017). She has also edited or co-edited (with Elizabeth Erwin) two collections on The Walking Dead. She has recently written numerous articles on folk horror and, six years ago, co-founded (with Elizabeth Erwin and Gwen Hofmann) the website Horror Homeroom. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter @DawnKeetley.
Emma Kostopolus is an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University, where she works in digital rhetorics and studies games in addition to horror. Her work can be found at Sidequest.zone, Unwinnable Monthly, Into the Spine, and Ghouls Magazine, among other places. When she’s not watching scary movies, she’s playing scary games to research her manuscript project about the procedural rhetoric of survival horror.
Paul A. J. Lewis is a writer, photographer and lecturer. He is also a sometimes filmmaker (when time and inspiration allow) with regional filmmaking collective Grimnir Pictures, most recently co-writing and directing Grimnir’s short films “Silent Hero” and “The Imposter”. In 2007, he wrote an MA in Critical Approaches to International Media, and was previously a programme leader on an undergraduate English Studies programme. Currently, he is course convenor for the institution’s HE photography programmes, taking sole responsibility for writing and managing the FdA in Photography and BA(Hons) in Photography. His PhD focuses on Paul Verhoeven’s American films, from RoboCop (1987) to Hollow Man (2000), exploring their complex relationship with the eras of Reagan and Bush – from Star Wars to the First Gulf War. Prior to embarking on his PhD, Paul completed his Master’s Degree in Contemporary Literature and Film in 2000, his thesis examining gender and violence in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1982). His undergraduate degree was in English and Social Science.
Vince A. Liaguno is the Bram Stoker Award-winning editor of Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (Dark Scribe Press, 2008), an anthology of queer horror fiction, which he co-edited with Chad Helder, and Butcher Knives & Body Counts (Dark Scribe Press, 2011)—a collection of essays on the formula, frights, and fun of the slasher film. He currently resides in the mitten state of Michigan, where he is a licensed nursing home administrator by day and a writer, anthologist, and pop culture enthusiast by night. He is a member (and former Secretary) of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). You can find him at his author website and on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Goodreads.
Melissa C. Macero is a PhD candidate in English literature at University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and film with a concentration in popular culture, horror studies, and critical theory. Her dissertation explores the aesthetics of the horror genre and in particular the genre’s imagined relationship to its working-class audience, from Henry James to contemporary slashers. Her work is forthcoming in Genre, as well as two edited collections: The Many Lives of The Purge and Women in Folk Horror: The Cauldron and the Cradle. Twitter: @meliss1900
Conner McAleese is a current PhD student at the University of Dundee. He is currently researching how horror represents post-9/11 fears around public spaces and how we inhabit them. His first novel, The Goose Mistress (Dark Ink Press, 2018) dives into the life of Eva Braun during World War Two and describes her descent into madness. His horror short stories have published in Haunted Voices Scotland, Fall Anthology, and Spine Magazine, he is a regular contributor to ScaryStudies.com and is (allegedly) working on his first full length horror novel. He lives with his cat, Glory, in Dundee and offers a reward of ten points to Gryffindor to whomever can correctly identify the backstory to Glory’s name.
Dr Gwyneth Peaty is a Research Fellow in The Centre for Culture & Technology at Curtin University, Western Australia. Her research interests include popular culture, disability, digital media, horror, monstrosity, and the Gothic. Recent publications include “Joyful Encounters: Learning to Play Well with Machines” in the Cultural Science Journal (with Eleanor Sandry), “The familiar places we dream about: Pokémon GO and Nostalgia during a Global Pandemic” in the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (with Tama Leaver), and “Monstrous Machines and Devilish Devices” in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature.
Douglas Rasmussen received his Master of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Saskatchewan where he wrote on the AMC television series Breaking Bad. His primary field of interest is film and television studies with a focus on politics in popular culture. He is on Twitter @grumpybookgeek.
Nick Redfern has taught film at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Central Lancashire, and Leeds Trinity University. He has published research on the aesthetics of horror films and trailers in Post Script, Enter Text, Humanities Bulletin, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.
Jerry Sampson is a freelance writer, horror writer, film analyst, screenwriter, and editor. She writes for Ghouls Magazine, Rue Morgue, Moving Pictures Film Club, Vague Visages, Horror Obsessive, and other horror sites. She is featured on many podcasts discussing horror film and analysis and has released a book of short horror stories entitled The Scream & Other Dark Stories. Her love for film and the horror genre leads her to explore and question the darkness that lies in the shadows of human existence. She studies the concept of inherited trauma and finds that theme coming up unconsciously in much of her work. You can find her on Instagram @thesleepermustawaken and on Twitter @ladyscriptwrit.
Alex Svensson is Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College in their Visual & Media Arts department. He has also regularly teaches film and media courses in MIT’s Literature Section. His research primarily focuses on horror media, media controversies, promotional culture, found footage, and digital forms of media production, exhibition, circulation, archiving, and reception. Some of his most recent writing can be found in the new book Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (ed. Dawn Keetley); other work can be found in Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, in media res, and Brattle Theatre Film Notes Blog.
