Nicole D. Sconiers is an author and screenwriter who blends horror, speculative fiction and humor in stories centering complex Black heroines. She is the author of Escape from Beckyville: Tales of Race, Hair and Rage, a speculative fiction short-story collection that has been taught at colleges and universities around the country.   Her work has appeared in Nightmare magazine, Lightspeed magazine, Speculative City, NIGHTLIGHT: A Horror Fiction Podcast, PodCastle, the Black Futures edition of Spelman College’s literary journal Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor and other publications and anthologies.   Her short story “A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree” will appear in Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams, coming October 3, 2023 from Random House.