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ELIZABETH BROADBENT
ABOUT ME
When I was five, I started writing and never stopped. Home is the second-snarkiest city in the South with my husband, three sons, and two large dogs. Mine is well-behaved. My husband's is not. On the right day, I'll admit that I desperately miss South Carolina, especially my friends and the Congaree swamp.
These days, I write Southern Gothic horror, science fiction, and speculative poetry. Ink Vine and Ninety-Eight Sabers published in 2024 with Undertaker Book. Blood Cypress, another Southern Gothic set in Lower Congaree, comes out with Raw Dog Screaming Press in April. My science fiction novel, Breaking Neverland, is scheduled for publication with Sley House in June 2026, and its companion collection of short stories, Tigers of Greater Antarctica, comes out in March 2026.
I like playing in the same sandboxes. In fourth grade, I made my class laugh with a series of stories about a klutzy knight and his Thanksgiving turkey sidekick. Most of my horror takes place in a backwoods South Cack town named Lower Congaree, and most of my sci-fi revolves around the same cyberpunk dystopia.
During my MFA at the University of South Carolina, George Singleton asked my class to write a short story. I handed him a 11K word novelette (oops) called Naked & Famous. It was a semi-finalist for the William Faulkner/William Wisdom awards in 2006, when I was also a top-ten finalist for their novel-in-progress category (the same year, I was banned from the university's James Dickey Awards after winning the fiction competition on blind submission for three years running).
Many years later, I rediscovered Naked & Famous. After several drafts, it was accepted by two publishers the same day. I decided to go with EJL Editions. It was published on July 19th, 2023.
As Annabeth Chatwin, I wrote ten young adult novels for LGBTQIA+ kids. My husband's high school students didn't have any books about living as a gay or bisexual teen in the American South that didn't involve getting the hell out of the South, so I wrote some (I didn't want his kids to know they were his wife's, so I used a pseudonym). He Called Me Beautiful, a book about two boys growing up in Richmond post-Matthew Shepard, was an orange-banner winner on Amazon on and off for over a year.
Since then, I've turned to Southern Gothic. Most of it takes place in my fake county, Legare (that's Luh-gree, due to the bastardization of South Carolinian Huguenot French), in the town of Lower Congaree.
I became a speculative fiction author in June of 2022. After several poems were accepted quickly, I branched into horror and sci-fi. Before that, I had a long career as a journalist and essayist. For more than eight years, I was a staff writer at Scary Mommy, the largest parenting news site on the web. There, I wrote feminist journalism about the intersection between mental health, politics, and parenting to an underserved audience, first under the guidance of founder Jill Smokler, then under the table leadership of head editor Sam Angoletta. My favorite essays dealt with the Murdaugh murders, Moms for Liberty, Q-Anon, and Cocaine Bear.
During that time, I also wrote for The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Insider, and more. I appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and the BBC World News. I talked a lot about race, though my BBC interview was a scathing indictment of AI tech in the writing field. Conservative commentator Joe Walsh called me "everything wrong with American today" in a since-deleted tweet.
I remain proud of my work at ADDitude Magazine, the first and only print magazine for people with ADHD and autism, where I continue to freelance. You can see my web contributions here.
My favorite authors are William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Conner, and Thomas Wolf. My favorite books change, but my main influences come from The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and the short stories of Fitzgerald and O'Conner.
My modern indie horror favs include Lee Murray, Patricia Highsmith, Jolie Toomajan, Carson Winter, and Tim McGregor, all for their prose—all are fanastic stylists for different reasons, and if you haven't read Posthaste Manor by Winter and Toomajan, it's a treat in two styles. My favorite person working with structure right now (sometimes literally) is Andrew Sullivan (The Marigold is a masterpiece). When it comes to storytelling, I like Christi Nogle, Caleb Stephens, Bridget D. Brave, P.L. McMillan, and Ai Jiang, all for very different reasons—if you're familiar with those authors, you know that seeing them all in the same sentence is fairly hilarious.
When it comes to TV, I love The Magicians, Fringe, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Arrested Development; Aquateen Hunger Force, Archer, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, Outer Range, From, and The Venture Brothers.
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