Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the International Horror Guild's 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books). They have one son.