February is African American History Month here in the United States. In 2013, when this series began, it was also Women in Horror Month (WiHM) which is now celebrated by many in March during Women’s History Month. In 2013, as an Ambassador for Women in Horror Month, Sumiko Saulson put together the original book 60 Black Women in Horror at the the intersection of the two. Over the next five years, the world of women writing horror from the African Diaspora nearly doubled. and 100+ Black Women in Horror, a 2018 update, containing 109 biographies, was born. Now, in 2023, five years after 100+ Black Women in Horror, with the assistance of Kenya Moss-Dyme the list is once again being updated, to include over 40 new names compiled in a new book, 150 Black Women in Horror.
Here is the combined list of 150, listed alphabetically, in batches of 10. Here are the third 10 of them.
Patricia E. Canterbury
Award-winning poet, short story writer, novelist, philanthropist and political scientist Patricia E. Canterbury contributed the story “Wild Chocolate” to the Dark Dreams anthologies of paranormal horror and suspense. It is the story of a visit to a remote village in the Brazilian jungle and what happens to a married couple, and of the power of pure love. Her primary genre is mystery. +
Pearl Cleage
Known for her civil rights orientation and her feminist views with regards to what black women experience, Pearl Cleage has achieved critical acclaim and commercial success for her non-fiction titles and her genre-hopping fiction. Her supernaturally themed 2011 Just Wanna Testify is about a couple of black fashion models in Atlanta who happen to be vampires, although they have a whole lot in common with succubi. www.pearlcleage.net
Donyae Coles
Donyae Coles is an artist and a writer whose work is speculative in nature. Her writing is lyrical and haunting and focuses on blending real life anxieties and issues with genre elements found in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She is represented by Lane Heymont of Tobias Literary for written works. She works in traditional media, mainly watercolor, acrylic, and ink. Her artworks convey a narrative all of their own. donyaecoles.com
Crystal Connor
Sci-Fi and horror writer Crystal Connor began writing tales of the things that strike fear in the hearts of men during her time serving overseas in the US Navy. Travel to Africa, Asia and the Middle East while in the service helped her to learn of creatures in many national legends that sparked her imagination, leading to the creation of her first novel, The Darkness. www.wordsmithcrystalconnor.blogspot.com
Melody Cooper
Melody is a Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and winner of an Adobe Women at Sundance fellowship for her sci fi horror script “Those Who Kill.” Upcoming: the feature adaptation of African fantasy novel Beasts Of Prey. She’s also developing a horror TV series with Sterling K. Brown and Academy Award-winner Tarell McCraney. Melody started out as staff writer on CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories while still in the 2019 HBO Access Writing Program. One of her two episodes, “Ibeji” was directed by Bola Ogun and won a Silver Telly. Other credits: Law & Order: SVU, co-producer on Power Book IV: Force, Shudder Labs. Melody also writes comic books, including OMNI, Noir is the New Black (“Igbo Landing”) and DC’s Milestones of History. She’s co-founder of Nyx Horror Collective and co-producer of the Nyx short film program “13 Minutes of Horror” on Shudder (2021 and 2022). Nyx offers horror fellowships in partnership with Stowe Story Labs to woman-identifying writers. socials: @melodycooper@mastodon.world Instagram: @melodycooperflims
www.melodyMcooper.com www.nyxhorror.com
Joy M. Copeland
Short horror fiction author Joy M. Copeland has been included in the horror anthologies Dark Dreams. Sycorax’s Daughters and To Hell in a Fast Car. She also wrote a series of books on histories of select members of the Teamsters Union.
www.goodreads.com/author/show/4072428.Joy_M_Copeland
Arielle Crowell
Arielle Crowell is the author of Deadly Magnolia, the story of Nicodemus LaCroix a serial killer who may have met his match. After his wife’s sudden death, he finds out the hard way that her family has deep ties to the Haitian voodoo community. She also wrote Monster, which is about more human horrors, and Mr. Undesirable, about three bad boys on a road to redemption.
Tracy Cross
Tracy Cross’s work has been featured in several podcasts and mass-market anthologies. Tracy Cross’s work has been featured in several podcasts, including ‘Nighty Night with Rabia Chaudry (advocate and author of the New York Times bestselling book “Adnan’s Story”). Her work can be found in several anthologies, including Don’t Break the Oath, Pandemics Unleashed and 99 Tiny Terrors. Her first book, Rootwork, a folk horror homage to her late grandmother. Her first book, Rootwork, was published by Dark Hart Publishing in 2022. She lives in Washington, DC, and is an active member of the HWA. She is on instagram as tracycrosswrites and twitter as tracycwrites. She loves disco and shares her latest exploits and information on her blog: tracycwritesonline.com.
Vicy Cross
She writes dystopian fiction, gothic horror, historical fantasies and other speculative fiction. Her debut novel on Storm Moon Press, Tuesday Apocalypse takes place in the 1940s in a post-apocalyptic London where tentacle monsters draw a nun and a young girl into increasingly treacherous worlds of erotic temptation and madness. She has written dark poetry and short stories in Infernal Ink Magazine and Poems from the Darkside.
www.facebook.com/AuthorVicyCross
L.M. Davis
An author of young adult paranormal fiction, science fiction and dark fantasy, Ms. Davis successfully applies a horror overlay to her young adult science-fiction series Skinless, where a teenage alien finds her mother abducted by intergalactic bogeymen. Shifters is another paranormal young adult fiction series featuring a cast of multicultural shape-shifters. It includes the titles Interlopers and Posers.
Black Women in Horror 
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