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.
Skeletons in the Swimmin’ Hole: Tales from Haunted Disney World (Admit One Literary Theme Park Press, 2010), her collection of ghost stories set in Disney Parks, has been called “spooky alchemy at its finest” by Famous Monsters of Filmland‘s Peter Schwotzer; her Pushcart-nominated novel Bad Apple (Vagabondage Press Books, 2012) was noted “deeply disturbing in the best way possible” by SciFi Saturday Night.
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 member of the Horror Writers Association and 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, and from 2015 — 2018, she went back to volunteer at the Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, in Norwalk, CT, as a Gallery Guide (where she put in almost 1400 hours between 2001 and 2004).
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, her husband, Nathan, and her cat, Mikey, and she still frequently goes to bed with the lights on.
