Trained as a journalist ,Gemma Files has been a movie critic, teacher, screenwriter and award-winning horror writer for almost thirty years. Her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction, while her novel Experimental Film (ChiZine Publications) won both the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best (Adult) Novel. She is also the author of three books of speculative poetry (most recently Invocabulary, from Aqueduct Press), a Weird Western trilogy (the Hexslinger series — A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), a story-cycle (We Will All Go Down Together) and four collections of short fiction (Kissing Carrion/em> and The Worm in Every Heart, both from CZP, and Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places, both from Trepidatio).