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Shawn Phillips is an urban fantasy writer based in Oklahoma. Her debut novel follows a neurodivergent non-binary linguist whose expertise in vampire mythology turns out to be considerably more dangerous than her academic committee warned her about. A passionate reader of fantasy, romantasy, and romance, she reads voraciously across genres with a particular love for complex characters and stories that challenge her thinking.
Shawn Phillips is an urban fantasy writer based in Oklahoma whose debut novel lives at the intersection of linguistics, the African diaspora, sapphic romance, and the supernatural. It follows a neurodivergent non-binary pansexual linguist through devastating loss and into a found family of vampires, witches, werewolves, and Vodou practitioners — and a polyamorous love story about two people who had both stopped believing they were allowed to want one. A passionate reader across genres, Shawn's main loves are fantasy, romantasy, and romance, with a deep appreciation for anime and stories built around complex characters that challenge the way she sees the world. Her debut novel is currently in progress with a first draft expected in July 2026.
Shawn Phillips is an urban fantasy writer based in Oklahoma whose work lives at the intersection of linguistics, the African diaspora, queer identity, and the supernatural. Her debut novel follows a neurodivergent non-binary pansexual linguist who has spent her career studying the origins of vampire mythology across linguistic traditions — Old Church Slavonic, West African oral histories, Haitian Creole ceremony texts, Vodou ritual language. When her research paper proves too accurate, she loses almost everything. What comes next takes her to New Orleans and Haiti and into a found family she never expected.
The novel handles grief, suicidal ideation, complex love, and polyamory alongside its supernatural mystery and romance. It draws on Vodou, Hoodoo, and the oral traditions of the African diaspora as systems of genuine knowledge rather than atmosphere. At its center is a love story between two people who had both stopped believing they deserved something like this, and a found family of witches, werewolves, vampires, and Vodou practitioners who were all rejected by the world they came from.
An avid reader across genres, Shawn's greatest loves are fantasy, romantasy, and romance — stories built around complex characters, deep world-building, and ideas that challenge the way she sees the world. She has a deep passion for anime for the same reason. Her debut novel is in progress with a first draft expected in July 2026.
A PhD linguist specializing in dead languages is hired by an independent antiquities research institute to decipher a collection of texts no university department would touch. What she finds inside them is not a historical curiosity — it is a correspondence, and some of the parties are still very much available to respond.
Set in a present-day city where the undead have had centuries to accumulate opinions about linguistic drift, this debut novel is about knowledge as power, consent as mythology, and what it means to fluently speak a language designed to open things that should stay closed.
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The genre intersection and why linguistics makes the perfect entry point for a story about knowledge as danger.
The real scholarship behind the fictional world-building — what dead languages actually tell us about the people who spoke them.
Pre-Stoker vampire tradition and what gets erased when one popular narrative dominates the conversation.
The Hardcore Literature Club, the 100-books-a-year goal, and what serious literary fiction teaches genre fiction writers.
Writing around demanding night shift work, long drafting sessions, and making space for the manuscript when time is genuinely limited.
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