Shannon Riley
(Mary J. Turner)

Mary J. Turner was born February 27, 1941, near Ripley, Mississippi. Her fiction, poetry and articles have been published in more than 250 magazines, anthologies and newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada, including Gauntlet, Deathrealm, and Eldritch Tales, and on various websites including Art of Horror, Morbid Musings, and Goth Time. She founded the small independednt publishing company, Southern Rose Productions in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1988, publishing the horror magazines Tapestry, Dark Side, and Midnight Express, the mainstream poetry journal Southern Rose Review, the Shamrock Market Report and Fiction Writer’s Review. She also edited the non-genre poetry anthology Heartsongs, A Treasury of Verse.

Her own chapbooks include Petals of a Rose (poetry), The Enchanted Unicorn (children’s fantasy), Hillbilly Blues vols. I and II, and Beasts (horror fiction), which has been recommended for a 2001 Bram Stoker Award. She was named one of the best new poets of the year 1987, and included in Who’s Who in U.S. Writers, Editors, and Poets, 1986-1989.

In 1994 her short horror story “Trophy” won first place in the Gum Tree Celebration of Writing Competition.

She is editor and publisher of the Internet magazine Tapestry, and the new Internet newsletter Midnight Express (both electronic versions of print publications from Southern Rose Productions.) She is a member of Horror Writers Association (HWA), an international organization of writers, publishers and agents involved in the horror literature genre.

For more information email shannonriley@southernroseproductions.com or editor@tapestrymagazine.com or write Southern Rose Productions, 1070 County Road 540, Ripley, MS 38663-8727.

(Article first posted February 2002)

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