Panel 2 - Women in Lovecraftian Fiction
Join these authors and artists in a discussion on how the face of Weird Fiction is changing to include more diverse points of view.
Anya Martin has always rooted for the monster and regrets abandoning her earliest career aspiration--paleontology. She's also half-Finnish, still likes punk rock though now with a heavy side of blues and experimental jazz, has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, cooks dangerously hot curries, earns her living as a journalist and abides in Atlanta. Her fiction appears in such anthologies and magazines as the upcoming Eternal Frankenstein, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Giallo Fantastique, Cassilda's Song, Xnoybis #2, Borderlands 6, Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond, and Womanthology: Heroic. She is also associate producer of The Outer Dark podcast, which interviews weird fiction creators and was awarded Best Podcast for 2015 by This Is Horror. She grew up with Weird as the daughter of William C. Martin, First Fandom member and one of the world's most prominent H.P. Lovecraft collectors.
Rose O'Keefe is the owner/ publisher of Eraserhead Press, the leading publishing house of Bizarro Fiction since 1999. Eraserhead Press is comprised of one main line of books and four imprints: Deadite Press, Fungasm Press, Lazy Fascist Press and The New Bizarro Author Series. Under O’Keefe’s direction, Eraserhead Press has released over three hundred titles and developed an international cult following for its cutting-edge weird fiction which has been praised by The Guardian, Chuck Palahniuk, Jack Ketchum, Boing Boing, and Cracked.com, among others. As a leader in the Bizarro Fiction community, she hosts monthly writer's gatherings, writer's retreats on the Oregon Coast, and the annual convention/art event, BizarroCon. In addition to being a full-time publisher and editor, she’s also an avid homebrewer and Argentine tango dancer. She lives in Portland, OR.
Liv Rainey-Smith's original art is created through xylography, the practice of carving and printing wood. Rainey-Smith draws upon both European and Japanese techniques to create her work and favors working with natural materials as much as possible. She finds inspiration in early European prints, esoteric traditions, folklore, weird fiction, and the natural world. She won the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 2025. Rainey-Smith's woodcut art illustrates The Starry Wisdom Library Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time, and accompanies her story in The Dagon Collection.
Michael Griffin has released a novel, Hieroglyphs of Blood and Bone (Journalstone, 2017), and a short fiction collection, The Lure of Devouring Light (Word Horde, 2016), and the novella "An Ideal Retreat" (Dim Shores, 2016). His short stories have appeared in magazines like Apex, Black Static, Lovecraft eZine and Strange Aeons, and the anthologies The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Autumn Cthulhu, the Shirley Jackson Award winner The Grimscribe's Puppets, The Children of Old Leech and Eternal Frankenstein. He's an ambient musician and founder of Hypnos Recordings, an ambient record label he operates with his wife in Portland, Oregon. Michael blogs at griffinwords.com. On Twitter, he posts as @mgsoundvisions.
ROSS E. LOCKHART is an author, anthologist, editor, and publisher. A lifelong fan of supernatural, fantastic, speculative, and weird fiction, Lockhart is a veteran of small-press publishing, having edited scores of well-regarded novels of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He edited the anthologies The Book of Cthulhu I and II, Tales of Jack the Ripper, The Children of Old Leech (with Justin Steele), Giallo Fantastique, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Eternal Frankenstein, and the forthcoming Tales from a Talking Board (October 2017). He is the author of Chick Bassist. Lockhart lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife Jennifer, hundreds of books, and Elinor Phantom, a Shih Tzu moonlighting as his editorial assistant.