BIO
Kristi Petersen Schoonover’s short fiction has been featured in The Adirondack Review, Orca Lit, Barbaric Yawp, The Illuminata, Carpe Articulum Literary Review, Afternoon, I Like Monkeys, New Witch Magazine, MudRock: Stories & Tales, and many, many others; by far, however, her favorite short pieces are those she wrote specifically for anthologies as diverse as Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope, Generation X-ed, ForNever After, Dancing in the Shadows: An Anne Rice Tribute Anthology, Dead Stars & Stone Arches: A Collection of Utah Horror, Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters, Ghastly Gastronomy, and Bugs.
Her short story collection, The Shadows Behind, was published by Books & Boos Press in April of 2019 and has been noted as “potent stuff” by the Horror Fiction Review.
She served as co-editor for Read Short Fiction and the recipient of Norman Mailer Writers Colony Winter 2010, 2011, and 2012 Residencies. Currently, she is the founding editor of 34 Orchard Literary Journal and occasionally appears on the Dark Discussions Horror Film podcast. She is a board member of the New England Horror Writers.
She holds a BA in Creative Writing in Literature from Burlington College in Vermont and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College; prior to all of that, she was a student at the University of Rhode Island, where up until 2014 she was a member of the Pearlman Writers Group. Her influences include Joyce Carol Oates, Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Pearlman, Haruki Murakami, Koji Suzuki, Gina Ochsner and David Means, among at least thirty others. She’s constantly looking for ways to blend her favorite genres’ hallmarks, film’s visual qualities, and literature’s themes in her writing. When does she have the most fun? Revision, actually. That’s her favorite part.
In her former lives, she enjoyed stage managing at Theatreworks, New Milford, where in the past she has stage managed their productions of The Woman in Black (1998), Night of the Iguana (1997), Seascape (2013), The Last Night of Ballyhoo (2014) and The Game’s Afoot or Holmes for the Holidays (2014). She was a Fishes & Invertebrates Husbandry Volunteer at Mystic Aquarium from 2002-2004.
She was a Gallery Ambassador volunteer at the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk from 2001–2004 and from 2015–2019. She now works on the aquarium’s staff as a Floor Guide.
When she’s not embroiled in writing and writing-related projects, she enjoys birdwatching, scrapbooking, horror film marathons with her cousin Maryanne, spending time in Walt Disney World, and hanging out in Newport with friend and poet Heather Sullivan. She lives in the Connecticut woods with her housemate, Charles and her husband, Nathan, and she still frequently goes to bed with the lights on.
