Sumiko Saulson

Sumiko Saulson (pronouns: they/them or ze/hir) is an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror whose latest novel, the horror romance Somnalia: Metamorphoses of Flynn Keahi (sequel to Happiness and Other Diseases is available on Bram Stoker Speciality Press Award®-winning Mocha Memoirs Press.

Sumiko is a 2x Bram Stoker Award® Finalist in the Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection category for Melancholia: A Book of Dark Poetry (2024, Bludgeoned Girls Press) and The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry (2022, Dooky Zines). They have been nominated for an Elgin Poetry Award twice for these poetry collections, and won a third-place Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Stars Award for the 2022 poem “Surviving.”

Winner of the Ladies of Horror Readers' Choice Award for the collection Within Me Without Me (Dooky Zines), Afrosurrealist Writers Award (2018) for the short story “A Balm of Brackish Water”, Grand Prize 2017 BCC Voice “Reframing the Other” contest, four 2nd Place Carry The Light Sci-fi/Fantasy Awards (2015 through 2018), 2017 Mixy Award, 6th Place in the Next Great Horror Writers Contest (2017). They are the recipient of the 2002 STAND Grant for First Time Directors, 2016 HWA StokerCon “Scholarship from Hell”, 2018 Ara Joe Grant for Zinemakers, 2020 HWA Diversity Grant recipient, and 2021 Ladies in Horror Fiction grant.

Sumiko has an AA in English from Berkeley City College