"If we don't define the canon, someone will define it for us." That line, from Dr. Chesya Burke, became the organizing principle behind an anthology that started as a phone call between two old friends and ended up assembling some of the most influential names in Black horror alongside brand-new voices getting their first-ever publication.
Maurice Broaddus is an award-winning Afrofuturist, editor, and librarian with over a hundred short stories published in Lightspeed Magazine, Black Panther anthologies, Jordan Peele's Out There Screaming, and more. Dr. Chesya Burke is an assistant professor of English and US literatures and director of Africana Studies at Stetson University, whose writing has been compared to Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison by Nikki Giovanni, and named "formidable" by Samuel Delany. Together they've edited Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now, out from Flame Tree Publishing on 17 November 2026, featuring contributors including Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and P. Djèlí Clark.
We get into how the project evolved from an impossibly broad vision into a focused, budget- and genre-constrained anthology, why a poetry reading at a convention led to poems being added to the collection almost by accident, and how a script from Tales from the Hood ended up sitting inside a prose anthology. We also talk candidly about what new writers actually need to hear — that developing a distinctive voice can take a decade, that AI actively hinders that development, and that rejection is universal even among the writers who inspired this very book.
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