Jenny Ashford was born in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1972, and fell in love with
ghosts, witches and monsters as soon as she was able to read stories about
them. Much of her childhood was spent watching “The Addams Family,” listening to goth rock, and scouring thrift shops for black lace dresses and
veils.
After making a fruitless attempt at a writing career after high school, she gave
up and went to college to be a graphic designer. The writing bug, however,
never went away, and Jenny kept writing scary stories in her off hours; her
first published story was “Jack’s Black Shadow,” which was a runner-up in her local newspaper’s Halloween story contest. Later stories appeared on the DeviantLit webzine, and
even later ones appeared in actual anthologies like ChimeraWorld #3, ChimeraWorld #4 (both from Chimericana Books), History Is Dead (Permuted Press), Crossings (Drollerie Press), and 2012 AD (Severed Press).
Now Jenny has a published book of short stories called Hopeful Monsters, has a novel called Bellwether coming out in December 2010, and has several dozen more unpublished short stories and nine or ten more novels
waiting in the wings, and has a notebook crammed with a gazillion more story
ideas.
She is also an artist, working in ad design as a day job (on the night shift),
making horror-themed stationery, soap, perfume and playing cards, and doing
bizarre pop-art paintings and Photoshop collages in any spare moments.
She loves old school punk and deathrock, “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” books about evolution, David Lynch movies, and coffee.
