StokerCon 2025

Rob Costello (he/him) writes dark and contemporary fiction with a queer bent for and about young people. He’s the contributing editor of We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures, nominated for a 2024 Bram Stoker Award® and named a 2024 CYBILS Award Finalist as well as a Notable/Recommended/Best Book of 2024 by the New York Public Library, Ginger Nuts of Horror, PseudoPod, Reactor Magazine, and Locus Magazine. He’s also author of the dark fiction story collection The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times, named a finalist for The Whirling Prize. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Dark, The NoSleep Podcast, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, PseudoPod, Hunger Mountain, Cape Cod Review, and Narrative, among other publications.

An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys is his debut novel.

An alumnus of Millay Arts, he holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served on the faculty of the Highlights Foundation since 2014. He is co-founder (with Lesa Cline-Ransome, Jo Knowles, and Jennifer Richard Jacobson) of the R(ev)ise and Shine! writing community, and he lives in upstate NY with his husband and their four-legged overlords.

Learn more at: www.cloudbusterpress.com & www.revise-and-shine.com.