In conversation with Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith

In conversation with Angela Yuriko Smith

My first introduction to Angela Yuriko Smith was through poetry, which is one of my first loves. She contributed the poem “Los Vigilantes Oscuros” to Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas (2021). Later, I was lucky enough to have my poem “Necrotic Ambrosia” included in Space & Time Magazine, which is published by Yuriko Smith. Over the years, our paths have crossed many times in such venues as panels at StokerCon, The Horror Poetry Showcase, and other publications. The speculative poetry community continues to grow (in part due to Angela’s work at Authortunities), but it’s still a place where everyone knows everyone else. 

Even though Angela Yuriko Smith is an editor, a poet, and a publisher, she has also broken ground with her efforts in fiction and nonfiction. In 2021, Yuriko Smith won two Bram Stoker Awards®: “Horror Writers: Architects of Hope” (The Sirens Call, Issue 55) took Superior Achievement in Short Non-Fiction and Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken. (Yuriko Publishing) won for Superior Achievement in Poetry Collection. Angela Yuriko Smith is knocking it out the park in this year’s award season too. Her editorial efforts, co-edited with Lee Murray, on Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror (Black Spot Books, 2023) garnered a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-fiction, 2023. Her work continues to bring attention to representation of female Asian voices in horror, and her advocacy through Authortunities keeps writers informed on the publishing front. It doesn’t get any better than that.  –Carina Bissett

About Angela Yuriko Smith 

About Angela Yuriko Smith 
Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.

Interview with Angela Yuriko Smith 

BISSETT: What was your first experience with horror?

YURIKO SMITH: I grew up with horror. The first house I ever lived in as a baby was horrifically haunted. I have a clear memory of my body floating over my crib in the dark, and then I fell onto the mattress. Around the same time I’m told I somehow got out of my crib and through a chain locked door leading to the basement (there was a reason the basement door had a chain lock, but that’s a whole story on its own). The basement door was ripped open during the night and my parents found me there, sitting on top of some boxes in the dark, silhouetted in the window. Thinking I was a burglar, my dad shoved a bunch of furniture at me (a reasonable response, honestly) and I was lucky not to be crushed. I remember seeing the basement door kicked open from the basement side, the chain lock dangling and a small TV table smashed in front of it. I remember floating above my crib and being dropped. I don’t remember the basement.

My first experience with horror as a genre was somewhere around first or second grade. I went to St. Mary’s Catholic School in Cheyenne, Wyoming. During a visit to the school library, I discovered Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum: Twelve Shuddery Stories for Daring Young Readers. I devoured it, enamored with these stories that felt comfortable to me. My favorite was “Shadow, Shadow On the Wall” by Theodore Sturgeon. The boy in the story really ‘got me’ like no one else did. I checked that book out so many times the nuns worried about me and finally made me check it back in, after which it went missing. Years later I hunted a copy of that book down and it’s a treasured possession. I wondered if my old librarian’s ears were burning when I finally found a copy.

BISSETT: What attracts you to horror as a genre?

YURIKO SMITH: There is a bias against darkness that horror isn’t limited by. In fact, I think horror is one of the least biased and open-minded genres. We understand sometimes the monster is just a karmic reaction to something else. Sometimes a monster is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes we are the monster. Horror is cautionary. Be kind to an old woman in the woods or you may regret it.

Horror is also empowering. We roleplay our biggest fears, face the worst that can happen and learn how to overcome them. It’s a genre for survivors. A recent study shared from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) determined that fans of horror, particularly the morbidly curious, exhibited much higher resilience during the recent pandemic.  (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492010/) Horror is a genre that brings people together… because we all know what happens when people split up. #stabmagnets

About Angela Yuriko Smith 
Angela Yuriko Smith

BISSETT: Who or what terrifies you?

YURIKO SMITH: If you had asked me this question in my 30s, I would’ve answered everything. Spiders, the dark, mirrors, dolls, chihuahuas, disembodied voices, ghosts, demons… what didn’t scare me? Slowly, over the years I’ve been lucky enough to face all my fears. In the end, it turns out fear is just an illusion. It hypes us up. The man behind the curtain can be faced, defeated and is most likely terrified of us (hence all the theatrics). I think right now my fear is seeing creatures (both human and non-human variety) get hurt. That’s one I hope remains behind that curtain.

BISSETT: What are the challenges you’ve faced as a woman working in horror?

YURIKO SMITH: Probably the misconception that women that create horror are somehow freakish: Elvira goth princesses or Satanic. Years ago I was hanging out with a coworker and she was disparaging the Christian religion. I made the comment that there’s good people and bad people all over. She looked at me in shock and said “How can you say that? Aren’t you a Satanist?” I was dumbfounded. When I asked her why she thought that, she replied it was because I wear black and write horror. I wear black so I don’t have to agonize over what to wear and I write horror to work out traumas, I told her. She nodded, like she was listening, and then said, “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.” Our publisher at the time was a very religious man, so it mattered. I wondered, even then, if I had been male would it even have mattered?

BISSETT: What advice do you have to women working in the field?

YURIKO SMITH: Don’t let bias define you. People can think whatever they want about us. It’s how we accept the labels that keeps them there. If someone called me a purple-headed-people-eater I would laugh it off, because they are obviously joking or wrong. The same thing with any label. You can accept it or brush it aside as not even worth your time and then go do something amazing. Speaking of doing something amazing, forge your own path. There are a lot of people who tell you how something should be done. Take that into consideration, and then do it how it makes sense to you.

BISSETT: You balance numerous roles in your life as an author, a poet, an editor, and a publisher.  How do you do it all?

YURIKO SMITH: I love that you might entertain the idea that I am doing it all. I don’t feel that way. There are always more tasks than I have minutes. I did get a full time assistant half-way through last year and he takes care of stuff I never seem to get around to, like social media. I also try to divide my days by task to be more efficient. I have personal writing, marketing and manager days, and then press writing, marketing and manager days. I have running task lists on the six days where I can just copy/paste things to take care of on that day, when I get to it. I have to be really disciplined not to try to go back to the previous lists to finish things I couldn’t get done. I remind myself almost daily that I most likely won’t get everything on a day’s list done. The point is to do the essential things and enjoy it all. 

BISSETT: Horror is considered an inclusive genre. Would you agree? In what ways have you felt welcomed? Excluded?

YURIKO SMITH: I very much agree that horror is inclusive. When I came to my first horror convention (WorldHorrorCon in Atlanta in 2015, I think) I was actually trying to come to grips with my dark side and finally banish it forever. I’d been offered a position writing Bible studies that was pretty lucrative but the two genres weren’t going to mix. I came to the convention to leave my demons, and instead found my people. It felt so good to be myself among people who not only accepted, but celebrated who I was. I went back, declined the job and have been writing dark speculative poetry and fiction since. I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t found such a warm, loving and inclusive community waiting for me in the dark. And, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)’s study, the world needs us. I repeat, horror is a genre that brings people together… because we all know what happens when people split up. #stabmagnets

About Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women (Black Spot Books, 2023) 

About Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women (Black Spot Books, 2023) Angela Yuriko Smith 
Angela Yuriko Smith


From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend, for generations, Asian women’s roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In Unquiet Spirits, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of 21 personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

Carina Bissett

Women in Horror Month By Carina Bissett
Angela Yuriko Smith

Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. She is the author of numerous shorts stories, which are featured in her debut collection Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations (Trepidatio Publishing, 2024), and she is the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas. She is currently a Bram Stoker finalist for her essay “Words Wielded by Women” (Apex Magazine, 2023), a comprehensive retrospective of women in horror. Links to her work can be found at http://carinabissett.com.


Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations

 Dead Girl, Driving and Other DevastationsWomen in Horror Month
Angela Yuriko Smith

In this powerful debut, Carina Bissett explores the liminal spaces between the magical and the mundane, horror and humor, fairy tales and fabulism. A young woman discovers apotheosis at the intersection of her cross-cultural heritage. A simulacrum rebels against her coding to create a new universe of her own making. A poison assassin tears the world apart in the relentless pursuit of her true love—the one person alive who can destroy her. Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations erases expectations, forging new trails on the map of contemporary fiction. Includes an introduction by Julie C. Day, author of Uncommon Miracles and The Rampant

Praise for Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations

“Carina Bissett is one of my favorite speculative authors writing today—magic and myth, horror and revenge, wonder and hope. Her stories are original, lyrical, and haunting—Shirley Jackson mixed with Ursula LeGuin and a dash of Neil Gaiman. An amazing collection of stories.—Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion, a Bram Stoker Award finalist

“Carina Bissett’s collection is a thing of wonder and beauty. It is a true representation of Carina herself: whimsical, visceral, lovely, and fierce. You can hear women’s voices screaming while roses fall from their lips. Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations is a triumph.”—Mercedes M. Yardley, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Little Dead Red

“From fairy tale revisions to fresh takes on monstrous transitions and the absolute horrors of being female, no one knows how to write a story like Carina Bissett. Fierce yet fragile.”—Lindy Ryan, author of Bless Your Heart

“In a debut collection weaving folklore and fairy tale and told in magical, lyrical, irresistible prose, Carina Bissett inveigles readers with the breadth of her skill. A feat of woven wonder, with spells sketched in the air and strands stretched taut, Dead Girl Driving and Other Devastations is an enchanting tapestry of silken stories, the collection establishing Bissett as a world-class author of fabulism, fantasy, and horror. A must-read for lovers of Neil Gaiman, Angela Slatter, and Carmen Maria Machado.” —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Awards-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

“Ravishing flights of fantasy.”—Priya Sharma, Shirley Jackson award-winning author of All the Fabulous Beasts and Ormeshadow

“Dark, often violent, Dead Girl, Driving & Other Devastations doesn’t lie to you about the nature of its stories. Between the title page and the Afterword lies a harrowing alliance of nightmare and fairytale. The pages are full of strange birds, resurrections, second chances, monstrous women, enchantments, and inventions. These stories explore a dark and permissive imagination, unafraid to disturb the monster at the back of the cave. It is a collection for the brave and forlorn, for those seeking escape, vengeance, transformation, or grace. There is wonder here, and freedom from shackles—for those fierce enough to wrench loose of them.”—C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter

“Carina’s short stories are absolutely luminous and deeply unsettling. Savour this collection like a fine blood-red wine. It’s absolute perfection and will linger long after the pages are closed.”—KT Wagner

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  • Carina Bissett

    Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. She is the author of numerous shorts stories, which are featured in her debut collection Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations (Trepidatio Publishing, 2024), and she is the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas. She is currently a Bram Stoker finalist for her essay “Words Wielded by Women” (Apex Magazine, 2023), a comprehensive retrospective of women in horror. Links to her work can be found at http://carinabissett.com.

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