Nicole Willson lives with her husband outside of Washington, DC; this does not mean she wants to talk U.S. politics with you. She has been a frequent visitor to small coastal towns located along the Eastern seaboard but has yet to see anything truly alarming emerge from those waters, much to her disappointment. She’s hopeful that her lifelong aversion to eating fish or seafood might earn her a little mercy when the hungry ocean gods finally start coming ashore.

Nicole’s horror/dark fantasy novel Tidepool (Parliament House Press) debuted in August 2021 and was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel and the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Debut. The novel was showcased in Pitch Wars 2017, where Nicole was mentored by Peter McLean (Priest of Bones). A Spanish translation of Tidepool is available from Dilatando Mentes Editorial.

Her novella The Shadow Dancers of Brixton Hill (Cemetery Gates Media) was published in June 2023 and her YA horror novel The Keeper of the Key is coming from Parliament House Press in Fall 2024.

Her short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Gates Media, Death Knell Press, and in Hinged on Medium. You can find an up-to-date list of Nicole’s fiction on Medium here.

Nicole is an active member of the Horror Writers Association. She is a two-time participant in both the Borderlands Writers Boot Camp and the Futurescapes Writers Workshop, and she was lucky enough to be part of the Fearscapes inaugural workshop. She is also a recipient of a 2022 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant.

She has been a publications editor, a web content specialist, and an editorial assistant. She fulfilled a longtime dream of competing on “Jeopardy!” in 2011, although she did not fulfill her longtime dream of being a Jeopardy champion, alas.

If you actually read all this, she’s grateful.