02/20/2026 BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Linda D. Addison

Candace Nola
15 hours ago
4 min read

As we do every year in the month of February, Uncomfortably Dark takes time out to honor Black authors and Black history from every era, past and present. If you already read widely and diversely or want to get started; please add these authors to your Must - Read lists and to those TBR piles!

A massive thank you to fellow author Eliza Broadbent for this huge undertaking for this month, enabling Uncomfortably Dark to honor at least one author a day, or more!

Linda D. Addison grew up in Philadelphia and began weaving stories at an early age. Ms Addison is the first African-American recipient of the world renowned HWA Bram Stoker Award\u00ae and has received five awards for collections: The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti; Four Elements written with Charlee Jacob, Marge Simon and Rain Graves; How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend short stories and poetry; Being Full of Light, Insubstantial; Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes.

In 2018, she received the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, Addison was designated SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. She co-edited Sycorax's Daughters anthology of horror fiction & poetry by African-American women with Kinitra Brooks PhD and Susana Morris PhD, which was a HWA Bram Stoker finalist in the Anthology category.

She currently lives in Arizona and has published over 400 poems, stories and articles. Look for her story in the Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology (Titan/Marvel).

Today, we honor Linda D. Addison

1. What kind of horror do you write/publish, and what brought you to the horror genre in particular?

I write poetry, fiction that is considered psychological horror in my own collections and many magazines and anthologies. Horror is my way to express and release my anger, frustration and inner pain at the terrible things that humans to other humans.

2. Who would you consider your influences and inspiration?

I’ve had enough influences and inspirations to fill several books and growing as I discover new authors. I will say my first inspiration was my mother, Janet Marie Webster, who is no longer with us, but I grew up with her telling us fairy tales she made up and often put us in as characters. So, I thought making up tales was a natural thing.

3. What piece of writing has meant the most to you, and why? This can be both your own and/or another author’s.

The first thing that came to mind was a story I wrote in 2024, “The Tale of the Twin Stars, Born of Earth & Sea” published in the anthology Bestiary of Blood edited by Jamal Hodge. It was one of the hardest pieces I’ve written because it involved child abuse and I used the emotional lens of my hard childhood to write the story.

Even though the story doesn’t include facts from my childhood, taking myself emotionally to the helpless, powerless state made me have to stop several times because of headaches and nausea. In the end, with Jamal’s patience help, the story was finished and I felt a deep healing in having finally faced the deepest parts of that pain.

4. What’s your writing/editing journey been like? What challenges have you faced?

In the beginning, I collected a lot of rejections, but the need to write the stories and poems drove me to keep trying, to increase my skills, to learn more about the business. There was one time I decided to stop writing because of just getting rejections. I don’t know how long that lasted, but I slowly felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. Eventually I went back to writing and submitting to feel sane again, which lead to getting a piece accepted by The Twilight Zone magazine. Even though the magazine went out of business before my story was published, I kept going forward and didn’t look back.

For whatever challenges might have been in my path as a Black woman writing horror, I’m very internally motivated and walked into spaces (literary and my day job in software development) centered in the quality of my work, looked at those who want to see me as less as their problem, not mine and kept it moving.

5. All horror is political. How do you think your politics informs your writing/editing?

My horror is flavored by my reactions to the world and politics. Horror allows us to make monsters that aren’t human but are inspired by humans in the real world. I have to be careful with how much of what’s going on I take in because there’s a slippery slope that can make me so angry that my creative side shuts down. In the end, all of my feelings go into my journals, so when I’m unable to write creatively, I capture those emotions on paper. Later I can revisit it later and use it as a seed to write new poems/stories.

6. Do you do any writing or editing that’s not fiction? If so, how did you come to that space, and where can we find it?

I have written more poetry than fiction to date, but I’m playing in the novel arena, which is so entirely different from what I’ve written. I’m giving it some time because many stories have come to me that need that kind of length. My first novel is with my agent. I’ll let everyone know when it finds a home, LOL!

7. What advice do you have for Black horror writers who are just getting started in the genre?

Allow yourself to write your first draft from the deepest shadows and emotions in your soul, like no one will read it. Don’t worry about the grammar, or what the message is, etc. When you’ve finished first draft you can decide to edit/rewrite for others to read. Know that if you allow the first draft to be raw and wild that it holds the seeds for what makes you different from others.