Poppy Nwosu on Hometown Haunts

YA Book Stack is back for 2022! Poppy Nwosu, editor of the recently published horror tales anthology, Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Tales, joins Emma to traverse through what is scary and what makes a tale especially horrific. Emma (a scaredy-cat) and Poppy (a genre-fiction aficionado) hone in on some of their favourite stories from the publication; chatting about the ways in which these short stories could be used in the classroom to unpack theme, writing style, or even the power of graphic artistry. From fears about environmental damage, monsters that sneak up in the night, and spirits that haunt the land, Hometown Haunts unsettles the reader and leads them to realise that at the end of the day, we are all scared of something. For more on YA Book Stack, visit https://www.vate.org.au/ya-book-stack.

Poppy Nwosu is an author of young adult fiction. She has published three romantic contemporary novels called Making Friends with Alice Dyson (2019), Taking Down Evelyn Tait (2020), and Road Tripping with Pearl Nash (2021), and is the creator of the 2021 YA anthology Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Tales. Her work has been shortlisted for the SPN Book of the Year award, Adelaide festival Unpublished Manuscript Award and the Readings Young Adult Book Prize, and has been awarded the SA Writers Fellowship residency at Varuna Writers House, as well as an Arts SA grant. She has appeared at Adelaide Writers Week and Salisbury Writers Festival among others. Growing up surrounded by cane fields and rainforest, Poppy studied music at university before living overseas in Ireland. She is now based in Adelaide, Australia.