WIHM 2026: Meet Rebecca Cuthbert

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you contribute to the horror genre.
I write in a lot of different subgenres, but much of my work has to do with shining a light on the quiet horrors of domestic spaces, as well as exploring the uncanny peeking out from beneath everyday lives. My seventh book will be out this summer with Uncomfortably Dark, run by Candace Nola and Christina Pfeiffer. It's a collection of poetry that blends horror with fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, called A Curse Thrown from the Hanging Tree. I've been fortunate to have my work recognized with awards and nominations, as well. My first book, a poetry collection called In Memory of Exoskeletons, won the 2024 Imadjinn Award for Best Poetry Collection, Creep This Way was nominated for a Golden Scoop Award, Self-Made Monsters was a finalist for the 2025 Imadjinn Award for Best Story Collection, and Six O'Clock House & Other Strange Tales won a bronze medal in the North American Book Awards and is currently a finalist for the 2026 Imadjinn Award for Best Story Collection. Individual poems and stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Award. 

Aside from publishing my own fiction and a bit of poetry, I am the editor-in-chief of Undertaker Books, a small press formed in April 2024. My partners there are D.L. Winchester and Cyan LeBlanc, and I couldn't ask for better team members. We're proud to have published a diverse array of voices, styles, and subgenres, with an excellent lineup for the rest of 2026 and for 2027, including Nicole Givens Kurtz, L. Marie Wood, Leticia Urieta, Chloe York, Kathleen Palm, and many more. 

I'm also an adjunct professor of creative writing at a SUNY school, so I'm always doing my best to recruit young writers into the genre. I've already converted a few who have helped out at Undertaker as interns, and encouraged many many more. We just started workshopping in my Intermediate Fiction classes this semester, and some of those stories have already blown me away. One of my (many) dreams is to sign former students on as Undertaker Books authors someday. We're quite a small press, and we struggle with limited resources, but whenever we can publish a writer's first book, it's really special for us. We're so happy to be a first step for debut authors, and I hope they know we will cheer them on when we see them on bestseller lists one day.
 
What drew you to the horror genre?
I've always been a bit of a solitary kid. Even before I got to know death and grief intimately (my mom died when I was nine), I was in the local library on summer vacations looking up ghost stories in the card catalogue. I've always been drawn to gothic settings and stories--I collect vintage paperback gothics, and I'm such a screaming fangirl for Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson, who are doing fascinating feminist work (and their book, Monster, She Wrote, is one of the biggest reasons I got back into writing a handful of years ago). If a book's back cover synopsis mentions the word "haunted," I'm shoving my money at the bookseller. 

I maybe should mention that there is a huge cemetery up the road from my childhood home. It's where we'd take walks, where we learned to ride our bikes, and where our dad taught me and my siblings how to drive. Now, it's where my mother is buried. So, in a way, it's almost like death has just always BEEN there. And my childhood home is haunted, or at least was. But that is a longer story. 

If you could recommend one creation of horror that everyone should consume, whether that be a book, podcast, movie, art, etc., what would you recommend?
Definitely everyone, not just women, should read Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson. I am not kidding when I say it changed my life. I read about all of these women who had to hide their art from their husbands and everyone else, sneaking their writing in by candlelight, publishing under masculine pen names; women who buried so many feminist themes just below the surface of what others, at the time, may have viewed as cheap sensationalism; women who were writing for love or money--and I asked myself what the hell was stopping ME. Those long-dead women told me, or showed me, that it was time to get off my ass and do the thing I think I was born to do. Write creepy stories. 
 
What advice would you give to the next generation of women coming into the horror genre?
I would tell them, and my former self, if I could go back, to be unapologetic about what they love. To write what they want to. To NOT be swayed by fears of what is too feminine, or too quiet, or too genre-heavy, or too literary, or too domestic. To not listen to teachers who made their passion feel like shame. I'd also tell them they don't just have to be or do one thing--that they can write in any genre, any style, any form. That one story can be heartbreaking grief horror with gorgeous prose that makes readers cry, and the next can be ridiculous nursing home comedy horror that makes people laugh so hard their stomachs hurt. That they can contain multitudes, and that there's no such thing as clashes within the self: the gardener and the teacher and the canner and the baker and the horror writer can be one and the same. I have learned this from experience. It would be nice if I hadn't spent so many years fighting it. I wish the young women coming after me wouldn't waste their time and energy like I did, trying so hard to be what they aren't, or to NOT be what they are (and what is frankly freaking awesome).
 
Where can folks find you these days?
Folks can find me on Facebook (Rebecca Cuthbert), Instagram (Rebecca_Cuthbert_Writes), and Bluesky  (@rebeccacuthbert.bsky.social). But my linktree has everything: linktr.ee/rebeccacuthbertwrites. My website is rebeccacuthbert.com, and people can find out about Undertaker Books projects and shop our titles at undertakerbooks.com. I'll be at StokerCon in June, and hope to see old friends and make new ones. Come say hello!