Ashley Blooms (they/she) is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Where I Can’t Follow and Every Bone a Prayer. Their work has been nominated for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, Weatherford Award, and Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and they have been named a South Arts State Literary Fellow for Kentucky. NPR said of Every Bone a Prayer, “If Southern Gothic masters Carson McCullers and William Faulkner were to sit down with standard bearers of fantastic literature like Rachel Hartman, Jeff Vandermeer, and Frances Hardinge, and co-write a book, they might come close to this, but only just.”
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, The Oxford American, Reactor, and elsewhere. They received their MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi and have been awarded residencies and scholarships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, and others.
She currently lives in Kentucky with their partner and pets where she is at work on two new projects. The first is an adult novel set during the rise of the Spiritualism movement that explores hauntings not as threats, but as necessary, queer disruptions to the status quo. The second is a middle grade novel based on their short story “Hainted,” where a young girl ventures into an abandoned coal mine in hopes of rescuing her parent’s marriage by overcoming a series of trials in the strange underground world of haints.