Edwardsville Author Publishes Tenth Book

EDWARDSVILLE – Award-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Donald is proud to announce her latest book, Blackfire Rising, released April 3, 2025 from Falstaff Books.

A long-time resident of Edwardsville, Ill., Elizabeth Donald is a writer fond of things that go chomp in the night. She is the author of the Blackfire urban fantasy series and Nocturne vampire mystery series, as well as other novels, novellas and short stories in the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres. She is a three-time winner of the Darrell Award for speculative fiction and recipient of the Mimi Zanger Literary Award. More recently Donald was runner-up in the Imadjinn film festival in the screenplay division, and a finalist for the Knost Award.

Among Donald’s previous fiction publications are Nocturne Infernum (Seventh Star Press), Moonlight Sonata (Dark Oak Press), Dreadmire (Spellbinder Publishing), Yanaguana (Crone Girls Press), Setting Suns (New Babel Books), Abaddon (Cerridwen Press) and more. Her latest short publications include stories published in Weird STL (St. Louis Writers Guild), parABnormal Magazine (Hiraeth Publishing) and Stories We Tell After Midnight (Crone Girls Press).

As a journalist, Donald spent more than two decades as reporter before going freelance in 2018. Her work has been published through the McClatchy Co. as well as in the St. Louis Labor Tribune, Feast Magazine, Inside Higher Ed, Current and more. She serves as president of the St. Louis Society of Professional Journalists as well as the Eville Writers, and is a member of the national SPJ Ethics Committee, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Authors Guild, PEN America, St. Louis Writers Guild and more writing and trade organizations than is healthy.

Donald holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Martin as well as a masters degree in media studies and an M.F.A. in creative writing, both from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She lives with her family in an allegedly haunted house in Edwardsville. In her spare time, she has no spare time.

Blackfire Rising is a compendium of several novels, novellas and short stories published for more than 15 years in a continuing series about a paramilitary group under contract to the U.S. government to fight supernatural threats. Beginning with The Cold Ones in 2008, Blackfire stories have appeared in anthologies and standalone volumes from various publishers. Last year, Falstaff Books acquired Blackfire and has collected it all in one volume, with new stories to carry the series forward. Blackfire Rising is now available at bookstores nationwide as well as online retailers.

For more information, contact Elizabeth Donald at edonald@donaldmedia.com or her assistant Kate Yates at kyates@donaldmedia.com.

Print Version