Shawn · Author
I write about grief, love, healing, and the supernatural, usually all at once.
I'm Shawn, an urban fantasy writer based in Oklahoma. My debut novel is the book I needed to exist. It follows a neurodivergent non-binary pansexual linguist through devastating loss, professional collapse, and the slow, terrifying process of learning that she is allowed to be loved. It handles suicide, complex grief, polyamory, the African diaspora, Vodou and Hoodoo and Creole linguistic tradition, and a found family of vampires, witches, werewolves, and Vodou practitioners who were all rejected by the world they came from.
It is also, genuinely, a love story. An ancient vampire falls in love with her. She falls in love back. It takes both of them a long time to believe they're allowed to. That is, I think, the most true part.
I came to this story through obsession — with language, with the origins of vampire mythology across cultures, with Vodou and Hoodoo and the Haitian and West African traditions that mainstream fantasy has borrowed from without ever looking at carefully. I wanted to look carefully. I also came to it through my own experience of loss, of being neurodivergent in a world that finds that inconvenient, of loving people in ways that didn't fit the shapes the world offers. The book knows about all of that.
Reading
Urban fantasy, sapphic fiction, literary fiction, horror, anything that takes its world-building seriously and its characters seriously. Currently: 25 books this year, including whatever the HLC is currently surviving together.
Tabletop RPGs
Dungeons and Dragons, Fortnite, Magic the Gathering, PS5, Board games, Steam games, Sims, Baulder's Gate 3!!!, Tomb Raider. Deeply invested in the lore of things that shouldn't exist.
Language & History
Historical linguistics, dead languages, Haitian Creole, West African oral traditions, Vodou ceremonial language, the African diaspora. This is the academic backbone of the book and the thing I care about most deeply as a researcher.
Being Human
Neurodivergent. Non-binary. Pansexual. Night shift worker. Cook. Seamstress. Deeply familiar with grief and also with joy. I write characters who are too much for the world they were born into because I know it gets better — and I know it's also genuinely hard.
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