L. Marie Wood is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® and Rhysling nominated author, screenwriter, essayist, and poet.  She writes high concept fiction that includes elements of psychological horror, mystery, dark fantasy, and romance. Wood won the Golden Stake Award for her novel The Promise Keeper.  She is a recipient of the MICO Award and has won Best Horror, Best Short Screenplay, and Best Action, Best Afrofuturism/Horror/Sci-Fi awards in both national and international film festivals. Wood has penned short fiction that has been published in groundbreaking works, including the anthologies like Sycorax’s Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire.  She is also part of the 2022 Bookfest Book Award winning poetry anthology, Under Her Skin.  Her academic writing has been published by Nightmare Magazine and in the cross-curricular text, Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook. Wood is the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, a horror scholar with a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and an MFA in Speculative Fiction, and a frequent contributor to the conversation around the evolution of genre fiction.  Learn more about L. Marie Wood at www.lmariewood.com.