Biography

I am a paranormal fiction writer who grew up in the tiny coal mining community of Woodbine just south of Corbin in southeastern Kentucky. (for some reason Woodbine is badly misplaced / poorly marked on this map; too, in Harlan County, Mary Alice and a couple of other spots are mislabeled. Viewers have my strongest of apologies.)

My poetry, short stories, and other writing to date have appeared in the e-zines associated with the now-defunct 3Sides Literary Agency, the limited Stories from the Red Light District anthology, in various projects associated with Apex Publications, and in the Help anthology.

I wrote my first ‘book’ at six and my first poetry at nine. The book has survived and is now buried in a memory box; the poetry, thankfully, long ago parted this earth. All through childhood, the creative arts including drawing, painting, sketching, and of course writing interested me more than anything else; I was all the time at work making something. As a Girl Scout and 4-H participant, I wrote event and camping write-ups for the local newspaper. I was a high school newspaper editor and yearbook designer and a university yearbook photographer; I had several poems published in the university literary magazine, The Aurora.

Also in my last year of high school and first year of college, I was active in the Corbin Community Theatre as an actor, singer, and stage manager. My stories, at least what I’ve written since 1996, take place in my own version of the gothic hinterlands of Harlan County, located in Kentucky. The great beauty of Harlan County contrasts sharply with abject, inherent strife. Its mountains are scarred by mining, and its people are quite often insular and distrustful. This landscape provides the backdrop for my writing and is often a character in its own right. Midnight, Midnight’s Heir, Starlight, Daybreak, and Eventide are all books in my "Harlan Vampires Series" – or HVS as it’s called in places around the ‘net and here on my site. The characters in my stories are not your usual bloodthirsty Bram Stoker-type vampires. They are people with hopes and dreams, desires, drives, and life-crises – some major, some minor, but all of which help push the characters into growth and understanding.

I am a contributing editor for Apex Publications, and an independent book reviewer and editor. I am the editor of the Harlan County Horrors anthology, out from Apex Book Company October 2009.

I have lived away from the mountains and lived deep in the mountains. My current home is in Central Kentucky where I live with my lifepartner and our cat. I am the mother of two young men and am an avid supporter of kidney disease and living organ donation awareness. The mountains, their culture, their superstitions, their particular magics, will always be in my heart and my blood.

Those of us who are both very wounded and very competent sometimes have the gift of appearing well when we are not. – Cary Tennis