Black Cat Weekly #237

Author Christina Hoag is a former journalist who has had her laptop searched by Colombian guerrillas, phone tapped in Venezuela, was suspected of drug trafficking in Guyana, hid under a car to evade Guatemalan soldiers, and posed as a nun to get inside a Caracas jail. She has interviewed gang members, bank robbers, thieves and thugs in prisons, shantytowns and slums, not to forget billionaires and presidents, some of whom fall into the previous categories. Now she writes about such characters in her fiction.
Christina's noir novel Skin of Tattoos was a finalist for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for suspense, while her YA thriller Girl on the Brink was named Suspense Magazine's Best YA. She also co-authored the nonfiction book, Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence, used in several universities.
She's a former staff writer for The Miami Herald and The Associated Press, and wrote from Latin America for Time, Business Week, The New York Times, Financial Times, Times of London, Houston Chronicle and other news outlets.
Christina lives in Los Angeles, where she has taught creative writing at a maximum-security prison and to at-risk teen girls. She is a regular speaker at writing conferences, book clubs, libraries and other venues.

Grant Tracey is the author of nearly fifty short stories and four collections of fiction, including Final Stanzas, published by Twelve Winters Press in 2015. He teaches courses in creative writing and film at the University of Northern Iowa, and he has been the fiction editor of the North American Review for over fifteen years. He was the recipient of an Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in 2013. In addition to his writing, editing and teaching, Grant has acted in more than twenty community theater productions. Cheap Amusements is his first novel.

Susan Shwartz has been nominated for the Nebula, the Hugo and the World Fantasy Awards and is the author of several novels, includuing Heritage of Flight and The Grail of Hearts, as well as the very well received Star Trek novels, Vulcan's Forge and Vulcan's Heart. She resides in New York City and is a veteran of the financial-services industry.

Philip E. High (1914 - 2006) Philip Empson High was an English science fiction author. Born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire in 1914, his writing career spanned over 50 years and encompassed 14 novels and numerous short stories. Philip E. High made his name initially in the 1950s with a series of short stories for magazines such as Authentic Science Fiction, New Worlds and Nebula. A collection of his short fiction, The Best of Philip E. High, was published in 2002.