About Lucy

Hi, I’m Lucy … thanks for visiting! Five of my works have received the Bram Stoker Award:

My fiction collection While the Black Stars Burn
My fiction collection Soft Apocalypses
Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide
My short story “Magdala Amygdala”
My poetry collection Chimeric Machines

I’m also the author of the Jessie Shimmer urban fantasy series from Del Rey:

You can find more stories about the characters in Spellbent in my collection Orchid Carousals.

I’m also the author of Sparks and Shadows, which won the 2008 Editors’ Choice Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Collection. My humor collection Installing Linux on a Dead Badger came out in October 2007.

I’m a graduate of the Clarion workshop and from 2006-2014 I directed the writing workshops at the Context convention. From 2010-2020, I was a faculty member in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. In June 2016, I graduated from the Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing program.

To date, I’ve made over 150 short fiction sales, over 60 poetry sales, and over 160 nonfiction sales on topics ranging from faeries to medicinal botany to ethernet switches. I have also written for role playing, online and educational games. If you’d like to see my entire list of publications, see my bibliography.

I live in Ohio with my husband, Gary A. Braunbeck; we’ve written several stories together.

If you’re looking for more about me, please visit my Biography, Photos, or Interviews pages.

What Kind of Fiction Do I Write?

I mostly write in different sub-genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I occasionally do media tie-in work and have written stories for a Doctor Who anthology, a Pathfinder gaming anthology, an X-Files anthology, and a Hellraiser anthology. I’ve written some erotica, but I haven’t written any romance (some readers picked up my urban fantasy novels expecting them to be romances and were not prepared for all the demonic mayhem). My science fiction is also often fairly dark, and my horror is darker still.

I’ve written a fair bit of zombie fiction and other post-apocalyptic fiction; I also write Lovecraftian fiction, steampunk, arcanepunk, biopunk, weird westerns, alternate history, quiet horror, social science fiction … if I enjoy it as a reader, chances are I’ve written it.