THOMAS GAFFNEY

Thomas Gaffney (he/him) was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He started writing as a child, making his own comic books and Choose Your Own Adventure® novels for the neighborhood. But then he fell in love with all things horror while reading a beat-up copy of Stephen King's IT that his mother brought home in a grab bag of used books.

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After surviving twelve years of Catholic school, Gaffney embarked on several careers—computer programmer, barista, account manager, operations manager—that allowed him to explore Philadelphia, its suburbs, and eventually Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, meeting an eclectic array of people and personalities that have made their way into his stories. Much like Henry Bemis in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last,” Gaffney considers himself “a bookish little man whose passion is the printed page” and has been reading, writing, and belatedly updating his Goodreads and StoryGraph accounts in his spare time.

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His collection of short stories, Stranger Things Have Happened, was named a 2019 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist for e-Book Fiction, a 2019 New Apple Literary Official Selection for Short Stories, a 2020 Book Excellence Award Winner for Horror, a 2020 Elite Choice Award Winner for Horror, and a 2020 International Book Awards Finalist for Horror. His later, individual short stories have been published in The Dread Machine, Bards & Sages Quarterly, Theme of Absence, and Anotherealm.

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Gaffney is still in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his ever-patient wife and spends too much time and money in local coffee shops. In 2018, he graduated from Southern New Hampshire University with a BA in Creative Writing and Fiction, and in 2024, graduated from Emerson College with a MFA in Popular Fiction & Publishing. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and running for Co-Chair of the Pittsburgh Chapter. He is currently working on his first novel (a haunted lake story) that was his senior thesis project at Emerson.​