We Demand Stories of Death Reimagined

Death - It will come for us and those we love. It is our biggest fear because the great beyond is the great unknown. It brings finality to everything we know and love. But are there other ways of looking at death - an altered existence, or a new beginning? Together, let's explore the myths, the stories, and the science of what we fear most - the end.

Leah Richards is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY; editor of Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture; a theater reviewer for Thinking Theater NYC; and a scholar of horror and the Gothic, primarily in film. She has published articles on vampires including Stoker's Dracula, Hammer vampires, AHS: Hotel, and The Strain; George A. Romero's Land of the Dead; the awful novel that Sweeney Todd is based on; and similar topics. She co-authored a book on Romero's non-zombie films and is currently working on a book about Welsh-language folk horror and sustainability initiatives.

Micaiah Johnson is a Brooklyn-based author and scholar. She received her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her MFA in fiction from Rutgers-Camden. She received her doctorate at Vanderbilt university. On her mother’s side, she is a first-generation traditional high school graduate. Her debut novel The Space Between Worlds won the Compton Crook Award and was an Editors’ Choice at The New York Times.

​Both her debut and its follow-up, Those Beyond the Wall, were named among NPR’s best books of the year, with The Space Between Worlds named one of the best science fiction books of the last decade. In her academic work she is concerned with questions at the intersection of race and technology, particularly as revealed in 19th Century America, a time punctuated by spectacular shifts in both. She also works on the necropolitical implications of preservation and race, both in centuries past and in our present moment of the Sixth Great Extinction."

Susana Martinez-Conde is an award-winning neuroscientist, author, and professor at the State University of New York. She is the founder and Executive Director of the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, which inspired her book "Champions of Illusion," published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

Her previous book, the international bestseller "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions," was published by Holt and won the Prisma Prize for Best Science Book of the Year. Martinez-Conde is one of the premier science communicators in the United States and has made television appearances on National Geographic Channel’s Redesign My Brain, Discovery Channel’s Head Games, The Daily Planet, PBS’s NOVA:scienceNow, StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, CBS Sunday Morning, and The World According to Jeff Goldblum. She is a frequent writer for publications such as Scientific American, New Scientist, American Scientist, Mental Floss, and How It Works.

​Her research and scientific communication activities have been featured in print in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among hundreds of media stories worldwide. She has published over a hundred academic articles in the most prestigious scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author: for novel Saint Death’s Daughter, and collection Bone Swans, Stories. Other work includes The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, and Desdemona and the Deep. Just out in April 2025: Saint Death’s Herald, second in the Saint Death Series. As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, and short fiction for podcasts like Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tales to Terrify, and Podcastle. In March 2023, she produced her collaborative sci-fi musical, Ballads from a Distant Star, at New York City’s Arts on Site. (Find her music at Bandcamp under Brimstone Rhine.) Forthcoming from Outland Entertainment is the GM-less TTRPG Negocios Infernales (“the Spanish Inquisition… INTERRUPTED by aliens!”), co-designed with her husband, writer and game-designer Carlos Hernandez. Find her website and Substack newsetter via her Linktree or try “csecooney” on various social media platforms.

Puloma Mukherjee is an immigrant writer,  mother, finance-desk-job holder based in New York City. A longtime member and organizer at BSFW, Puloma recently moderated a panel (“Death Reimagined”) for the “We Demand Stories” panel series for BSFW. Her work has appeared in NY Times Tiny Love Stories, The Revealer Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, and in an anthology of speculative fiction short stories. She is currently working on her first novel.