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We’re ba-ack!

The days are short, the nights might occasionally be cold. There’s even a chance that by January, we’ll be seeing winter weather. But we aren’t quite done with our favorite holiday just yet. So, to celebrate the one year mark of demons pushing their way into our world, we’re going to celebrate Halloween one more time. With authors reading from their stories in Halloween Carnival, Volumes 2 & 3 (October 2017, Hydra).

FEATURING:

KATE MARUYAMA‘s novel HARROWGATE was published by 47North. Her short work has appeared in Arcadia, Controlled Burn, Stoneboat and on Salon, The Rumpus, and Duende among other journals as well as in the anthologies WINTER HORROR DAYS, HALLOWEEN CARNIVAL and PHANTASMA: STORIES. She teaches in the BA and MFA programs of Antioch University Los Angeles as well as for Writing Workshops Los Angeles. Kate writes, teaches, cooks and eats in Los Angeles.

 


TAYLOR GRANT is a Hollywood screenwriter, award-winning filmmaker and two-time Bram Stoker Award® finalist. His work has been seen on network television, the big screen, the stage, the Web, as well as in comic books, newspapers, national magazines, anthologies, and heard on the radio. His most recent short films, The Vanished and Sticks and Stones, screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and received worldwide distribution through cable channel Shorts TV and domestic distribution through Sony. Sticks and Stones won the Jury Prize for best Short at the NUHO Film Festival.

Grant’s horror/sci-fi collection The Dark at the End of the Tunnel was the bestselling paperback of the year for Crystal Lake Publishing, and his co-authored comic book Evil Jester Presents was an Amazon #1 bestseller. He has sold, optioned and rewritten feature scripts for major Hollywood studios such as Universal, Imagine, and Lions Gate Entertainment. In addition, he created the horror-themed Fox Family animated series Monster Farm, had multiple scripts produced for various TV shows in children’s entertainment, and wrote MTV and VH1 music videos for some of the biggest artists in the world. His most recent horror fiction appears in two Random House/Hydra Publications: Halloween Carnival Vol. 3 and Dark Screams Vol.9.


GLEN HIRSHBERG’s stories have earned him three International Horror Guild Awards and the Shirley Jackson Award. His collections include The Two Sams, American Morons, The Janus Tree, and The Ones Who Are Waving. He is also the author of five novels: The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, and the Motherless Children trilogy (Motherless Child, Good Girls, and the forthcoming Nothing to Devour). With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a touring ghost story performance project. On his own, he founded the CREW program, through which he trains his most passionate students and sends them into the surrounding community to run extended creative writing camps for children with minimal access to artistic instruction or formal outlets for expression. He writes and teaches in the Los Angeles area, where he lives with his wife and children and cats.

 

And, we’ll be introducing you to three authors reading with Shades & Shadows for the very first time!

 

DAN VINING was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford and taught there. Previously, he was a newspaper reporter, a writer and editor at Rolling Stone as well as a screenwriter and Senior Lecturer at the American Film Institute Conservatory. He is the author of The Quick and The Next (Berkeley Books), an omnibus edition of which came out as Among the Living. He lives in one version of Los Angeles.

 


CHRISTINA CIGALA is a writer and producer residing in California with her dog Monkey. She has created television programming for MTV, ABC, CBS, Fox, Syfy, Speed Channel, HGTV, VH1, CBS and Tru TV, and has collaborated with creatives such as Jared Leto, Gordon Ramsey, Tyler Chrisley, and the U.S. Army. As a playwright, her work has been produced widely Off-Broadway, Off-off Broadway, in Los Angeles, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and in other regional theaters across the U.S. She has taught film intensives and guest lectured at Stanford University, Cal Arts, Colombia College, and the Actors Studio. Christina has an MFA in Playwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School in New York and a BA from Baylor University.


SHREYANS ZAVERI credits his varied storytelling skills to his vast educational background. His spark for fiction evolved with every new subject that he learned. From a Bachelor’s degree in Science to a double Master’s in Philosophy & Vsfx, the vistas of storytelling evolved every day. Shreyans sees a story in everything that he does. From the photographs that he takes to the movies he makes and the novels he authors, there is always a story waiting to be told. “The Fuehrer’s Blood” is Shreyans Zaveri’s first literary fiction novel. The author is currently busy working on his second untitled novel and hopes to continue writing compelling stories.

 




 

Hosted by Xach Fromson

Come join us at the Bearded Lady’s Mystic Museum and find out what’s in store for you with Year Five of our event.

Doors open at 8 p.m.

$10 online or at the door (if there are any left)

Books will be sold at the event, and we encourage you to support our authors.

Shades & Shadows is turning 4! We began with a promise: To bring genre fiction authors and fans together from across the spectrum, to create a platform for authors and fans to discover each other, and to have an absolute blast while doing it.

Well, after four years, we can say this: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. But you will! Come see our show on September 16th and help us ring in the beginning of Year 5.

 

Featuring:

Steven Barnes
Rebecca Gomez Farrell
Robert Payne Cabeen
Aditi Khorana
Meg Howrey

and one more TBA.

And if you’ve been to our birthday shows before, you know that means one other thing: Cake. Come and get it.

Doors at 8 p.m.
Show at 8:30 p.m.

The Mystic Museum is located at:
3204 Magnolia Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91505

Tickets are $10. Online coming soon, door sales if there are any left.



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RSVP on Facebook here.

Shades & Shadows is back at the Lit Crawl! We’ll be right in the middle as part of Round 2, beginning exactly at 8 p.m. at Pit Fire Pizza Co. They’ll be open and serving, so bring your appetite. If you dare.

From cannibalism to surreal environments where emotions can be your greatest enemy, we’re bringing some of L.A.’s best SF/F/H/WTF authors to bring new meaning to the phrase “matters of the heart.”

FEATURING:

Ben Loory is the author of the collections Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin, 2011) and Tales of Falling and Flying (Penguin, 2017), as well as a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2015). His fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, READ Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review, been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts, and performed live at WordTheatre in Los Angeles and London.

Loory is a graduate of Harvard University and holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Mercedes M. Yardley is a whimsical dark fantasist who wears stilettos, red lipstick, and poisonous flowers in her hair. She is the author of many diverse works, including Beautiful Sorrows, the Stabby Award-winning Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Novel of Murder and Whimsy, Detritus in Love, and the BONE ANGEL trilogy. She recently won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for her realistic horror story Little Dead Red. Mercedes lives and creates in Las Vegas with her family and menagerie of battle-scarred, rescued animal familiars. You can contact her at mercedesyardley(at)gmail(dot)com or follow her on Twitter. She is represented by Italia Gandolfo of Gandolfo Helin and Fountain Literary Management.

Kathleen Kaufman is a native Coloradan and long-time resident of Los Angeles, California. She is a University of Southern California alum, teaches high school English, and is a writing and composition adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. In addition to writing, Kathleen is an avid amateur photographer and has published work in The Huffington Post and other publications. When not writing, she probably has a camera in hand or is curled up with a good horror novel. Kathleen currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, terrier, and a pack of cats.

Gretchen McNeil is the author of several young adult horror/suspense novels for Balzer + Bray including POSSESS, 3:59, RELIC, GET EVEN, GET DIRTY, and the award-winning TEN. In 2016, Gretchen published her first YA comedy I’M NOT YOUR MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL, and her next novel will be the horror-comedy #MURDERTRENDING for Disney/Freeform. The film adaptation of TEN starring China Anne McClain (Descendants 2, Black Lightning) and Rome Flynn (The Bold and the Beautiful) premieres later this year.

Mallory Reaves is an Eisner-nominated writer from Southern California. She has been writing professionally since 2005, and has been credited on over thirty manga adaptations, two science fiction novels, an anthology, and two computer games. She currently lives in Orange with three cats, two dogs, a snake, and several friends. Her hobbies include coffee.

Lit Crawl information can be found at litcrawlla.org. Major thanks to Metro Los Angeles for sponsoring the event! Take the Red or Orange Lines to North Hollywood and you can access every venue for the Lit Crawl quickly, conveniently, and easily. Go Metro!

RSVP on Facebook here. The whole event is free. Be sure to check out other events in Rounds 1 and 3 as well. The whole night is a blast.

Writ Large Press is back with 90×90 and Shades & Shadows could not be more thrilled to be part of this celebration of the LA Literary Community.
We are LA’s creepiest literary organization and we have a question for you…
Have you ever wondered what lies beyond the rainbow?
For 90×90, Shades & Shadows is highlighting some of our favorite queer authors who push the limits of our imaginations.
Featuring:
Martin Pousson
MARTIN POUSSON was born and raised in Acadiana, the Cajun French bayou land of Louisiana. His new novel, Black Sheep Boy, includes stories that won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Two of his stories were finalists for the Glimmer Train Fiction Awards. His collection of poetry, Sugar, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and his first novel, No Place, Louisiana, was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. His writing has appeared in The Advocate, Antioch Review, Epoch, Five Points, New Orleans Review, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Loyola University, New Orleans, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York. As a student, he founded Out/Here, marched with NO/AIDS Task Force, and protested with ACT UP and Queer Nation. Then he taught at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and Loyola University. As a professor, he advised LGBTQA, Queer Ambassadors, Queer People of Color Collective, and the Pride Center Coalition. He now teaches at California State University Northridge and lives in downtown Los Angeles.

C.B. LEE is a bisexual writer based in California. She is a first-generation Asian American and has a BA in Sociology and Environmental Science, which occasionally comes in handy in her chosen career, but not usually. Lee enjoys reading, hiking and other outdoor pursuits.
Not Your Sidekick was named a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist in 2017. Seven Tears at High Tide was named a finalist for two Bisexual Book of the Year Awards (YA and Speculative Fiction) and also won a Rainbow Award for Best Bisexual Romance. Ms. Lee is also a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow.

CARLOS ALLENDE is a novelist. His first book, Cuadrillas y Contradanzas, a historical drama set during the War of Reform in Mexico, was very good but barely anyone read it. Never self-publish. The second one, Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle, set in Venice, California, throughout the first half of the 20th century, has had a little more success. He was a panelist at the LA Times Festival of Books, got a few good reviews, and was invited to a couple of readings.
His third book, Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love is both a thriller and a campy satire on consumerism and our current addiction to social media. Set in Los Angeles during the year preceding the Supreme Court’s strike on DOMA, the novel often touches difficult subjects such as bullying, racism, body acceptance, and misogyny within the gay community. It reads as if David Sedaris and Sophie Kinsella had taken turns adapting a movie directed by John Waters based on an original script by Chuck Palahniuk.
 
This show is FREE. Refreshments will be served.
Readings start at 8pm.
We will be at:
CIELO Galleries/Studios • 3201 Maple Avenue • Los Angeles, CA 90011
Make sure to check out the rest of the 90×90 events at their website: 90x90LA
It’s going to be an absolute scream!
Aren’t you curious?

 

 

Getting ever closer to the present. Now we’re in March of 2016. This episode features Steph Cha, Carlos Allende, and Ben Loory, and was recorded live at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.

(NOTE: If you aren’t seeing the links to buy the books, turn off AdBlock or white list our website.)

 

It’s here! Our special event held on April 28th, 2017 at the Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Con! Featuring Barbara Barnett, Stephen Graham Jones, Tananarive Due, Elizabeth Hand, Chuck Wendig, and Jonathan Maberry! This episode is presented uncut and in its entirety. It being at a horror writers’ convention, there is some (lots of) adult language and content. Listen at your own peril.

 

We got a chance to sit down with Ana Castillo and discuss her writing, her place in “genre fiction,” and much more. She has a piece included in the anthology Latin@ Rising, which we’ve linked to below. Enjoy!

 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

(basically, you’re free to download it, play it, share it, etc. so long as you leave it whole and don’t charge anybody for it.)

We haven’t given you a new podcast episode in a while. Sorry about that. But we’re back with one now, and more are on the way soon! Enjoy this episode, from our show in January of 2016. It features Joshua Scher, Stephanie Diaz, and Sherri L. Smith.

 



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

(basically, you’re free to download it, play it, share it, etc. so long as you leave it whole and don’t charge anybody for it.)

May 2017 Show!

Coming hot on the heels of our spectacular engagement aboard the Queen Mary for the Stoker Awards Convention in April, Shades & Shadows is joining forces with the Pasadena Lit Fest for a genre blending beast of a show! And oh, we have such sights to show you.

Join us at the legendary Pasadena Playhouse in their Friendship Room (off the courtyard) for our signature mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and fiction that defies categorization. And we have a lineup that is just to die for.

Featuring:

    Nicole Maggi began writing poems about unicorns and rainbows at a very early age. She detoured into acting, earned a BFA from Emerson College, and moved to NYC where she performed in lots of off-off-off-Broadway Shakespeare. After a decade of schlepping groceries on the subway, she and her husband hightailed it to sunny Los Angeles, where they now reside, surrounded by fruit trees, with their daughter and two oddball cats. She is the author of the YA fantasy TWIN WILLOWS TRILOGY, and the YA thriller THE FORGETTING, which was a 2016 International Thriller Writers Thriller Award finalist, a 2015 Junior Library Guild Selection, and a #1 Kindle Bestseller. Her next book, a contemporary YA, will be out next year.


 

 

Sebastian Bendix is a Los Angeles based writer and musician, as well as host of midnight horror film series, Friday Night Frights at The Cinefamily. He attended school at Emerson College for creative writing and spent his formative years in Boston playing in popular local band The Ghost of Tony Gold. Upon moving to LA he transitioned back to writing, contributing articles for the entertainment site CHUD.com and the print publication Mean Magazine. Stepping into the world of horror fiction, Bendix has found success both online and in print with numerous stories published in the genre imprints Grinning Skull Press, Encounters Magazine, Sanitarium Magazine, Xchyler Publishing and noted podcast The Wicked Library. Bendix self-published his first horror/fantasy novel The Patchwork Girl in 2013, and his second novel, The Stronghold, is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller that will be published in Fall 2017. Also an avid film lover, Bendix has a sci fi/horror script that has been optioned and is in development.


Kit Reed is an American Author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers, and has published upwards of thirty novels and too many short stories to count. She was a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of a five year grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation.

Her short stories have been published in places from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to the Yale Review and the Kenyon Review, and have been widely anthologized. Many of her stories are published as feminist science fiction and she has been nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award three times and the Shirley Jackson Award twice. She is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

 


C.B. Lee is a bisexual writer based in California. She is a first-generation Asian American and has a BA in Sociology and Environmental Science, which occasionally comes in handy in her chosen career, but not usually. Lee enjoys reading, hiking and other outdoor pursuits.

Not Your Sidekick was named a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist in 2017. Seven Tears at High Tide was named a finalist for two Bisexual Book of the Year Awards (YA and Speculative Fiction) and also won a Rainbow Award for Best Bisexual Romance. Ms. Lee is also a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow.

 


Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, GRACE (Counterpoint Press), which was awarded the 2017 First Novel Prize by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus (BCALA), was named Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, a New York Times Top Book 2016, a Book Riot Favorite Book of 2016, The Root Best Book of 2016, and an Entropy Magazine Best Book of 2016.

Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire, Asian American Lit Review, Rattling Wall and other places.

A practicing attorney, law professor, and creator of the popular L.A.-based reading series Dirty Laundry Lit, Deón is the recipient of a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Prague’s Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside–Palm Desert.


Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1960. She began reading at age 3, and was reading Homer’s Iliad and Kurt Vonnegut by age 10. Her favourite fiction has always been the various forms of fantastical fiction; everything from Caribbean folklore to Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and fantasy. She began writing in the genre somewhere around 1993, and sold a couple of short stories before she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop in 1995. In 1997 she won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for her novel Brown Girl in the Ring, which Warner Aspect then published in 1998. She’s written and published nine books of fiction and a number of short stories, and won some literary awards. She now lives in Southern California and is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, where she is a member of a faculty research cluster in Science Fiction.

And, as always, hosted by Xach Fromson and Lauren Candia.

And guess what? ITS FREE! RSVP on Facebook HERE.

Doors at 8 p.m. at the Pasadena Playhouse Friendship Room
39 S. El Molino Avenue
Pasadena, CA 9110

map

 

Winter is coming. And going. But this show? It’s lit.

Join us as we partner with the Horror Writers Association and StokerCon 2017 to bring you this very special Shades & Shadows reading.

StokerCon 2017 takes place April 27th – 30th aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. It is a celebration of the horror genre with tons of panels, presentations, and classes from some of the world’s leading experts in the field.

Shades & Shadows takes place on Friday, April 28th from 6pm – 8pm in the Queen’s Salon.

The lineup is a mix of StokerCon Guests of Honor and Stoker Award Nominees.

George R.R. Martin
Tananarive Due
Elizabeth Hand
Chuck Wendig
Barbara Barnett
Stephen Graham Jones

We know. WE KNOW!

As (almost) always, your hosts will be Xach Fromson and Lauren Candia.

Purchasing a weekend pass for StokerCon 2017 will get you in for free.

Can’t commit to a full weekend of horror programming with the industry’s best and brightest stars?

We got you.

We’re releasing a limited number of seats for folks who want to attend just the reading.

Tickets are $30.

Shades & Shadows members get $10 off the ticket price. Not a member yet? Become one today to take full advantage of this special perk.

Winter came and went, but we all know there’s more than one way to get the chills. Join us and the Queen Mary ghosts at StokerCon 2017!

 

Let us know you’re coming! RSVP on Facebook HERE.

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