Undertaker Books makes 'room' for Nicole Givens Kurtz
Undertaker Books is excited to announce that Nicole Givens Kurtz's THE SPIRIT ROOM, a story collection featuring southern gothic horror, will join the 2026 lineup!
Kurtz explained that it's a linked collection, with plenty of contemporary appeal:
"The Spirit Room is a collection of stories that feature Black protagonists in East Tennessee who experience horror and weird encounters," she said. "It’s similar to Lovecraft Country, the story collection, in that it has different stories centered in a certain area."
Kurtz was inspired by personal experiences, and crafting these stories was sometimes difficult.
"I chose to write southern horror because I am a Black southern woman, and living each day in America brings its own brand of horrific situations and scenarios," she said. "Horror allows for honest feelings, not tone policing or respectability politics or expectations. There’s a rawness, an unflinching glare that horror allows, especially for women, to be angry, to be furious, to be murderous and violent that other genres do not necessarily allow."
At Undertaker Books, raw honesty and righteous anger are more than welcome, especially if it comes with anything ghostly, ghoulish, spooky, or terrifying. And this collection does not disappoint in any of those areas! Seriously. Read this one with the lights on.
Additional information about Kurtz and her work will be shared in the coming months, but for now, here are just a few of her specialties and accolades:
Nicole Givens Kurtz has been called “a genre polymath who does crime, horror, and science fiction and fantasy (Book Riot).” Her horror weird western, Sisters of the Wild Sage, was included in Book Riot’s “The Best of the West: 8 Alternative History Westerns.” She’s a two-time Atomacon Palmetto Scribe Award winner (2021 and 2022), a recipient of the Ladies in Horror Grant, and a recipient of the HWA Diversity Grant. With over 20 years in publishing, Nicole has over 50 published short stories and is the editor of the groundbreaking anthologies SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire and Blackened Roots: An Anthology of the Undead with Tonia Ransom. In 2025, Kurtz's own publishing house, Mocha Memoirs Press, won the Horror Writers Association's Specialty Press Award, given to a specialty publisher whose work has substantially contributed to the horror genre. To learn more, visit nicolegivenskurtz.net.