SGJ Bio & Author Photos

BIO

So, if you need a bio from me, here’s the basic one, which I’ll try to keep updated. Can’t seem to get the titles to go properly italics, but surely you can fix that:

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of some thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Angel of Indian Lake,  I Was a Teenage Slasher, and the ongoing Earthdivers. Up before too long are True Believers and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

That’s usually plenty, and the right size for magazines and journals and sites, I think. If I’m needing to duck into a program or schedule or something, though, then those tend to be about this size:

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the August Derleth British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the American Library Association’s RUSA Award and Alex Award, the 2023 American Indian Festival of Words Writers Award, the Locus Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, and six This is Horror Awards. Stephen’s also been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and the Eisner Award, and he’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels. He’s the guy who wrote Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Earthdivers, and I Was a Teenage Slasher. Up next are True Believers, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Killer on the Road. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Feel free to mix & match/cutnpaste these two into some Frankenstein-bio, too, of course. Or completely make one up. I’m like John Locke: all possible bios pretty much apply, sure. And, if you need to list where I teach and who I am there:

• Ivena Baldwin Professor of English, University of Colorado at Boulder

And if you need a link for me, either/both of these’ll do:

• http://stephengrahamjones.com (that’s this place)
• https://twitter.com/SGJ72 (@SGJ72)

And, if you need to know how to pronounce my name:

Pronouns: he/him. Last name: “Jones” (I don’t go by “Graham,” in spite of every hotel and airline being pretty sure I should, as, evidently, “Stephen” is a failure of a name, “Graham” is so much better. but? it’s just my middle name. I wouldn’t even be using it, except, when I came on the scene back in the early 2000s, there was already a “Stephen Jones.” oh, and, as I was raised by a mom who jumped straight down anyone’s throat who ever even sounded like they might have called me “Steve,” I don’t go by that, either. and, yes, it’s always with the “ph” in the middle, like a litmus test)

And, if you need a count of my books . . . I think forty? But one of those (13th Night) is a single-issue standalone comic book. And one of these is a critical edition—has my face on front, but Billy Stratton did the book. Same with The Faster, Redder Road: that’s Theo Van Alst. Anyway, click to enbiggenate:

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AUTHOR PHOTO

As for author photos, man, you can search most of them up, but if you want attribution, which frighteningly few of them have, either scroll down for it, or, if the pic you’ve found isn’t thumbnailed here, hit me up, I’ll tell you who it was. And, a lot of these are thumbnails, but they should click to the high-res version. High as I got, anyway.

November 2023, in front of Gilgamesh bookstore, by the talented Alina Art:

 

January 2023—I tend to like the shots that don’t exactly have my face, and are kind of blurry besides. But, yeah, I know ones where I’m maybe actually looking at the camera tend to be what places find more usable:

   

And, anybody snagging these: “courtesy the author,” or whatever that placeholder is. And, feel free to B&W them, too.

April 2021, “Shirts with Collars,” Steve, because you can’t just always wear t-shirts (“Courtesy SGJ”):

[ thanks to Adam Wood for some help with that last one, above. and, if color’s your thing, here’s some of those: 1, 2, 3, 4 ]

Slasher shirt, um . . . “series,” maybe? April 2021. Just ‘Courtesy SGJ’ for them as well:

 

[ here’s those last two, in color: 1, 2 ]

And, yeah, because of the pandemic, 2020 kind of looks this for me:

But, right before that, at the end of 2019: these are credit  “Gary Isaacs”:

Here’s two more from 2019 — July, I believe:

 

“Courtesy SGJ” for the Wonder Woman one, “KRJ” for the second.

And then . . . looks like June 2018. Photo credit Tara Gray for the first one, Ellen Datlow (Jan 2018) for the second, with the goofy hat:

  ,

And, as for more staged stuff, here’s the two that were making the rounds in 2016. The cowboy hat one (2015) from the back of Mongrels is “Courtesy SGJ,” and the office one (2016) is “KRJ” again:

  

Well, I guess that axe-pic for Westword and The Stanley gets around as well—2017?— but I don’t think any from that shoot are circulating, except on posters:

But there’s some serious cool shots in there, from Anthony Camera—and [edit, edit], wait, another from that shoot is online:

 

That second one’s what CU did with it for that Stanley Horror Workshop I was doing or a couple years.

And, for an action-type shot, here’s one from Necronomicon (2017), by Katherine Duckett:

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FRIGHTENINGLY OLD STUFF

that I can’t in good conscience use anymore, but is kind of a fun walk through the back of the book covers (all with attribution, I think):

• The Fast Red Road and The Bird is Gone and Flushboy are all just “Courtesy SGJ” again (guess I don’t even have the original for the Bird-one anymore):

= 

But this pic is what I originally sent FC2 for FRR:

They didn’t so much as chuckle.

• That one on the back of ATBS and Demon Theory: Dixie Knight Photography (I don’t even seem to have the ATBS-one high-res anymore):

 

Think she took those in . . . 2002 and 2005, maybe? Thinking that’s the same necklace from Bird, in the first one. But, here’s the one I liked for DT:

Why I liked it? Because I’m wearing my Waylon buckle.

• The ones on the back of The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti and Ledfeather are by Becky Phillips:

 

These are . . . 2007, 2008, I think. I want to say it was two different shoots, too. Definitely a different fence. Definitely a new necklace. No human can keep any necklace in the world for longer than two years.

• Then there wasn’t one on the back of Bleed Into Me.  There also aren’t any on the backs of any of the Lazy Fascist books: The Last Final Girl, Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth, and Zombie Bake-Off, or on The Least of My Scars either, or The Gospel of Z, or Three Miles Past, or States of Grace, or—of course—Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. So, here’s a live shot that sums up all of those titles:

• Those ones on the back of It Came From Del Rio and The Ones That Got Away and Not for Nothing and After the People Lights Have Gone Off and Growing Up Dead in Texas, and the front of The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: Gary Isaacs:

Gary shot those first three in 2010, I believe, and then we got together again in . . . 2013? 2014? for that sitting-down one, down on Colfax in Denver, at a place called maybe . . . Three Lions? Three-something, anyway. What I remember was that, at some “4:48” in the afternoon or so, the bartender called out “ten cent shots for one minute!”

And, Gary got lots of other cool photographs—I’m saying that wrong. Gary MADE a lot of other cool photographs (dude’s a pro through and through), but we never used them for anything, I don’t guess.

Is that all the books?

And, I guess I should do attribution for the few magazine shots I still have. Most mags just use a stock kind of photo, but sometimes they send someone out:

  

In order, these are by: J. Marcus Weekley, Jeff Whitley, and Claudia Lopez (in 5280). There’s another shot from recent at High Country News, but it’s not for the stealing, looks like. It’s in/from the same genre this one is, though—which is also not easily got.

Too, I can’t even fake like I can dig up all the magazine shoots. The three above are just here because the photographer and me got to talking in email or something.

Oh, and one more, from Kris Saknussem, in which, like that Claudia Lopez one above, I get to wear one of my cool shirts, and be kind of blurry, which I dig so much—being blurry—that I’ll put a couple more like that up. No clue who snapped them, but the first one’s most definitely Kris, from when we were at the Erin Rose bar in New Orleans, right off Bourbon Street:

  

(that third pic made me think of my new [I’m speaking now from Sep2020] and favorite hat, so I had to slip that one into the fourth slot)

And here’s one from March 2017, by Kevin Richard Schafer, which he says is free and clear, can go anywhere (but, yes, please associate his name, of course):

And, digging all these up, I found all the ones that didn’t get used, from all the other shoots. What’s missing, though? The smiling ones. Publishers never bite on the smiley-faced ones. Smiley-faced writers aren’t “serious” writers, I guess:

Also missing: a really pricey photo shoot I did for Seven Spanish Angels (which, now that I think about it, also doesn’t have an author photo), down in some derelict under-the-subway subway place in NYC with Michael Mundy (seriously, this was Reliquary territory, like, it was back from when everyone was way shorter, and it was all fingerdeep in dust, and I don’t much think we were supposed to be there, or even know about it). But they’re tied up legally, probably locked in some drawer forever.

Anyway, give me a choice, I’d just use these, as this is how I see myself (2004 and 2016—Texas and Utah):

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HAIR NATION

Before a certain BBQ attacked me and caught my hair on fire long about 2001 or so, my hair was much longer. Here’s some proof. I mean, I blame it on the fire, but it could be that I’m forty-nine, too. Either way, mine ponytail, it’s ragging out these days. I don’t mind the greying—figure you earn your grey—but I do miss the healthy. Here’s a before and after, a zoo in Abilene in the early 2000s, then sixteen years later, on the University of Utah campus:

Looks like I’m wearing the same shirt in those two, but alas, nope: that shirt in the top pic is from these three-packs I used to buy from Walmart—blank, one-pocket—and used up so fast they hardly ever had time to even go through the laundry. That one in the second pic is a guitar-werewolf one from Society6. And? I’ve still got that book.

And here’s from when I used to wear my hair in a braid, longtimeback:

It was about this long then, I figure:

Maybe I should get a weave, for these post-forty years. Just ambush some horse, steal its tail, and run run run.

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BUGS &ETC

And . . . was gonna say bye, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t post some from this sort-of shoot, below. It was supposed to be for the official best author photo ever—someone I know name of Lucio had shown up with a Madagascar hissing cockroach—but that big loud angry scared bug would NOT stay on my tongue. Evidently it thought the tongue is what comes before the big crunch. But I promise, I wasn’t going to eat it. I just wanted to be on a book jacket with it:

Also? I’ve tried sending this in for my author photo, but nobody ever uses it: