The Year of the Witching(104)

I would also like to thank my friend and first critique partner, Jean Thomas. I’m so grateful for your edits, honesty, and encouragement. You’ve been by my side through every step of my writing journey, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

To one of my closest and oldest friends, Nicole Schaut. I cut my teeth on the stories we told together as kids, and I’ll always treasure them.

I owe a massive thank-you to the writing community. If I were to list all of you by name, these acknowledgments would be twenty pages long. But I’d like to thank Ronni Davis (the living embodiment of a ray of sunshine), the Pitch Wars team, Hannah Whitten, Patrice Caldwell, Sierra Elmore, June C.L. Tan, Deborah F. Savoy, Ciannon Smart, Victoria Lee, Kristin Lambert, Tracy Deonn, Sasha Peyton Smith, Christine Lynn Herman, Mel Howard, S. A. Chakraborty, Roseanne A. Brown, Dhonielle Clayton, Peyton Thomas, Emily A. Duncan, and my black girl magic crew.

I’m so grateful to the incomparable faculty at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, with special thanks to Dr. Ellen Malphrus for her mentorship, as well as thanks to Dr. Robert Kilgore, Dr. Lauren Hoffer, Dr. Mollie Barnes, and Dr. Erin McCoy. To my brilliant Society of Creative Writers, English alumni, and Fiction Workshop cohort—thank you. You were among the first to read this story, and if not for your enthusiasm at that early stage, I’m not sure I would have continued it. I’m especially grateful to my classmates Katie Hart and Bill Lisbon for their friendship and support.

And finally, to the survivors, to the underdogs, to the people who speak the truth when the world tries to silence them: thank you.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Alexis Henderson is a speculative fiction writer with a penchant for dark fantasy, witchcraft, and cosmic horror. She grew up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, which instilled in her a life-long love of ghost stories. Currently, Alexis resides in the sun-soaked marshland of Charleston, South Carolina.