Authors on Tap: Cynthia Pelayo with Ananda Lima and Juan MartinezThursday October 1st, 2026 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Please join us in person on, Thursday, October 1st at 7pm central to help celebrate the new horror anthology, Something Followed Us Home edited by Cynthia Pelayo and featuring stories by Juan Martinez and Ananda Lima. Something Followd Us Home features 16 Latine horror authors as they answer the question what are Latines afraid of? Isabel Cañas, Agustina Bazterrica, Mariana Enriquez, Alex Segura, and Zoraida Córdova are just a few of the names included in this highly anticipated fall release that reimagines immigration, colonization, faith, and folklore as the fears we inherit and carry across borders and generations.
About Something Followed Us Home:
Something followed us home. It crawled in with our prayers, slipped into our beds, watched from mirrors, waited in water, and learned our names.
Gathering chilling work from some of today’s most acclaimed Latiné voices, this horror anthology moves through haunted households, brutal landscapes, sacred spaces turned dangerous, and bodies claimed by forces both ancient and intimate. The dead murmur behind locked doors. Bones rebuild themselves under merciless suns. Love becomes a doorway for demonic hunger. Blood, devotion, and memory intertwine as the past presses back with teeth.
Something Followed Us Home is an unnerving, visceral, and impossible-to-shake collection that proves that what is carried forward does not remain quiet, and what follows us rarely leaves without taking something in return.
Featuring stories by: Agustina Bazterrica, Isabel Cañas, Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Zoraida Córdova, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Mariana Enriquez, Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro, Xochitl Gonzalez, Leopoldo Goût, Ananda Lima, Juan Martinez, Mónica Ojeda, Daniel José Older, Cynthia Pelayo, Lilliam Rivera, Diana Rodriguez Wallach, Alex Segura.
About the authors:
Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker and International Latino Book Award–winning author and poet. Her novels include It Came From Neverland, Vanishing Daughters, Forgotten Sisters, Children of Chicago and The Shoemaker’s Magician. Pelayo has also written numerous short stories and is editor of Something Followed Us Home: Tales of Latiné Horror.
Ananda Lima is the award-winning author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She was named in Newcity’s 2025 Lit 50 list, recognizing influential people and organizations shaping Chicago’s literary culture. Ananda's short story, Specter, is included in the Something Followed Us Home anthology.
Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay and the story collection Best Worst American. He is an associate professor at Northwestern University and his work has appeared most recently in EPOCH, Ploughshares, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sunday Morning Transport, Huizache, Ecotone, NIGHTMARE, McSweeney’s, NPR's Selected Shorts, Small Odysseys, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Sudden Fiction Latino, Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere. Juan's short story, Mechanical Servants LLC, is included in the Something Followed Us Home anthology.
About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free! Cynthia, Ananda, and Juan will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their book after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online with national shipping.