Paula Guran is senior editor for Prime Books. She edited the Juno fantasy imprint for six years from its small press inception through its incarnation as an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books. Guran is the editor of the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series of anthologies and editor of numerous other anthologies including Best New Paranormal Romance, Zombies: The Recent Dead, Vampires: The Recent Undead, Halloween, New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Brave New Love, and Witches: Wicked Wild & Wonderful. In an earlier life, she produced the pioneering weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination) and edited Horror Garage magazine (earning another IHG Award and a second World Fantasy nomination). Guran has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications and edited/produced for OMNI Online and Universal Studios HorrorOnline. She reviewed regularly for Publishers Weekly for over a decade, was review editor for Fantasy, a columnist for Cemetery Dance, and a consulting editor for CFQ (Cinemafantastique). She also served as nonfiction editor for Weird Tales. Guran’s also done a great deal of other various and sundry work in speculative fiction including editing magazines, agenting, publicity, teaching, and publishing. She lives in Akron, Ohio.
Alex C. Telander: When did you know you wanted to become an editor?
Paula Guran: I pretended to edit a little newspaper when I was just a kid, so I guess that was the first time I thought about it. Then I became the editor of the school newspaper in junior high and continued to edit throughout high school. Maybe if some people are natural writers, there are natural editors? I was burned out on journalism and writing in general by college. In college I discovered directing and technical theatre—scene design, lighting, that sort of thing – so that became my creative outlet and my first career. I didn’t go near writing or editing for a very long time after that. Much later, after I got into genre, I knew that was my ultimate goal.
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