ALEX DAWSON: I'm full time faculty at Rutgers University, where I teach creative writing (with a focus on fantasy and weird fiction) and curate/host "Inside the Writers House," a weekly video chat with authors from all over the world. I also lead an extracurricular, winter break, adventure retreat called Winter is Here! in which participants write/workshop fantasy fiction in evocative locales (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland), as well as ghost story weekends throughout the year, in which participants write/workshop tales of fear and trembling in haunted, stateside towns (Harpers Ferry, North Bennington, Salem). My forthcoming novel, Welcome to White Hart, has been called "magical and masterful" (Lev Grossman, The Magicians) and "a work of wizardry" (Idra Novey, Those Who Knew). Samantha Hunt (Mr. Splitfoot) called it a "wonder" and said it was "impossible not to be amazed," and Kevin Wilson (Nothing to See Here) said "in a perfect world, this would be the story we told our loved ones at Christmas." My bluegrass Jersey Devil musical, The Devil & Daisy Dirt (with folk singer Arlan Feiles) premieres in April. I'm a certified international tour guide, a licensed Central Park carriage driver, and the creator/owner of The Rac-On-Tour (get it?), a mobile bookstore/cabinet of wonder built on the back of a '53 International flatbed farm truck. I've been a bartender/bouncer in some of the roughest gutbuckets in NJ and have ridden a motorcycle for forty years.
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| The summit of Arthur's Seat, an extinct volcano outside Edinburgh in Scotland. |
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AIMEE LABRIE: I teach creative writing at Rutgers and work as the senior program administrator for Writers House. My short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. My second collection of short stories, Rage and Other Cages, won the 2022 Leapfrog Press Global Prize in Fiction and will be published in 2023. Joyce Carol Oates called it "Mordantly funny, eerily discomforting, & unexpectedly wise." In 2020, my short story “Rage” won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and my novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. In 2007, my first short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North Texas). My short fiction has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012, she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition. I have two dogs, Wyatt and Millie.
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| Reading at The Mysterious Bookshop for the launch of Darker Shades of Noir by Akashic Books. |
