Linda is the second oldest of ten children and grew up in Philadelphia where she graduated from Germantown High School. Her childhood memories include evenings listening to her mother tell stories she created, using the children as characters or watching scary movies with her mother at night.
From the first moment she held a book in her hands in kindergarten Ms. Addison knew she wanted to make one of her own. She graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a B.S. in Mathematics and currently lives in Arizona.
Linda is a founding member of a writing group, Circles In The Hair (CITH) which started meeting in 1990. She is poetry editor for Space & Time Magazine. Her work has made frequent appearances over the years on the honorable mention list for Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Year’s Best Science-Fiction.
In 2001, Addison was the first African-American to win the HWA’s Bram Stoker Award® for superior achievement in poetry for Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes. She has received four additional awards for collections: Being Full of Light, Insubstantial; How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, short stories and poetry collection; Four Elements written with Marge Simon, Rain Graves and Charlee Jacob; and The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti. Dark Duet, written with Stephen M. Wilson, was a 2012 HWA Bram Stoker Award® finalist. She co-edited Sycorax’s Daughters, an anthology of horror fiction & poetry by African-American women with Kinitra Brooks PhD and Susana Morris PhD, which was a HWA Bram Stoker Award® finalist.
Linda D. Addison is the only author with fiction in three landmark anthologies that celebrate African-American speculative writers: the award-winning anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction (Warner Aspect), Dark Dreams I and II (Kensington), and Dark Thirst (Pocket Book).
Addison is a founding member of the writer’s group Circles in the Hair (CITH) and a member of SFWA, HWA and SFPA. In 2018, she received the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, she was designated SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry.
She has over 400 poems, stories and articles in print. Addison has work in numerous publications, including Essence magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Weird Tales magazine #364, Miscreations anthology, Don’t Turn Out the Lights anthology and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Look for her story in the Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology (Titan/Marvel).