Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. She is the first Latina in history to win a Bram Stoker Award. Pelayo writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, and more.

Among other things, Cynthia and Carter discuss having a day job while writing, their approaches to social media, and writing fairy tales versus novels grounded in reality. At the end of their conversation, they make up a clever story using a line from Mindy Mejia’s A World of Hurt.