1: J.B. Kish

J.B. Kish is a horror author and project management book coach. He is a proud member of the Oregon Horror Writer’s Association, and his writing has been featured in Nightmare Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Metaphorosis Magazine’s Best of ’22, and others. Learn more at writingmilestones.com.

2: Frances Lu Pai Ippolito

Frances Lu Pai Ippolito (she/her) is a Chinese American judge, mom, writer, and publisher in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in several venues including Nightmare Magazine, Flame Tree’s Asian Ghost Stories, Chromophobia, Mother: Tales of Terror and Love, and Unquiet Spirits. She is the founder of game and book publisher Demagogue Press and the award-winning nonprofit, Qilin Press, which focuses on community stories. She is also the co-editor of two cozy horror anthologies through Underland Press, and serves as a HWA Trustee. But most importantly, she believes in ghosts. IG: @demagogue_press & @qilin_press

3: Elizabeth Mitchell

Elizabeth Mitchell is a disabled author, multidisciplinary artist, and publisher who’s lived many lives and goes by many names. Her work challenges, blends genres, explores haunted bodies, and delves into the human psyche. She’s an activist, a gamer with potato aim, and an avid reader. As a woman with several invisible illnesses, she enjoys living a semi-horizontal life with her husband and spoiled furbutts in the PNW. Her writing is also under Elle and Buffy.

4: Niyyah Ruscher-Haqq

Niyyah writes children and adult speculative fiction, fantasy and horror, with an emphasis on Muslim American and multicultural characters. You can find her short stories in Demagogue Press, Believe in Wonder Publishing, and upcoming by Hayaat House, Bel Esprit, and Weird Fiction Quarterly. By day, she’s a healthcare provider and can get really nerdy with you about infectious disease, emergency medicine and toxicology. Prior to her healthcare career she taught ESL in South Korea, Cambodia, and Hungary. She is the medical coordinator for the PCRF Portland chapter, the Portland SCBWI Coffee Coordinator, and Co-Chair for Young Willamette Writers. She is a member of SCBWI and HWA. Check out her seasonal handcrafted items at Niyyah Handcrafted!

5: Katherine Quevedo

Katherine Quevedo hails from Beaverton, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her fiction appears in Nightmare Magazine, Flame Tree Publishing’s Christmas Gothic Short Stories, LatineLit, Last Girls Club, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, and Elgin Award, and her poems appear in the HWA Poetry Showcase, Asimov’s, Old Moon Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of the fantasy novella Thrice Petrified (Of Metal and Magic Publishing, 2025) and the poetry chapbook The Inca Weaver’s Tales (Sword & Kettle Press, 2024).

6: Dan Finnegan

Dan Finnegan has written professionally for over fifteen years but is new to the world of fiction. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he discovered his love for punk rock, he now lives in Oregon with his family, spending his free time writing stories, playing guitar, and enjoying the PNW’s natural beauty. He gravitates toward horror and weird fiction in his writing and reading. He also co-hosts a podcast with his partner called Dusk to Dawn: Reading Horror and Weird Fiction.

7: Richard Leis

Richard Leis writes literary, horror, and speculative poems and stories that have been published in The Deadlands, F&SF, Nightmare, Impossible Archetype, the Timberline Review, and other publications, including anthologies from Crone Girls Press, House of Zolo, Weird Fiction Quarterly, and Wising Up Press. He works on an active Mars mission.

8: Andrew Fuller

Andrew S. Fuller writes dark and strange stories. His fiction appears in magazines, anthologies, a few short films, and the collection Constellations of Ruin (2023, Trepidatio Publishing). Since 1999, he’s served as editor of Three-Lobed Burning Eye magazine. He resides in the Pacific Northwest near the confluence of two rivers and a conclave of several extinct(?) volcanoes, and remains friends with crows and spiders.

9: H. A. Spector

H. A. Spector resides in the suburbs of beautiful Portland, Oregon where he serves as the Chair of the Horror Writers Association, Oregon Chapter. He holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Commercial Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University. You can find his work published in Dark Harbor Magazine. His advice for his fellow writers would be to do anything they need to in order to find a writing community, even if it means starting one themselves, and to invest in their local bookstores and libraries to ensure readership for all continues to exist for generations to come.