Erica Hoffmeister was born and raised in the fragrant orange groves of Southern California and now lives in Colorado, where she enjoys all four seasons teaching creative writing and rhetoric at Denver University and Metropolitan State University, Denver. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry and MA in English from Chapman University in 2015, where she served on the Graduate Student Council and was awarded the annual Wilkinson College Creative Writing Grant. She has interned at Sundress Publications, is a former editor for the Denver small press South Broadway Ghost Society, and is currently co-EIC of the anthology-in-progress, Take the Fruit: an Anthology of Religious Trauma. She is also a member of the Denver Horror Collective and volunteers for the PEN America Prison Writing Program as both an anthology editor and prison writing mentor.
As a multi-genre writer, she often writes about motherhood, religious trauma, and identity through a pop culture lens. She is the author of three collections of hybrid prose and poetry: the prize-winning chapbook Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019), and the full length books Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and All the Parts You Haven’t Lost (forthcoming from ELJ Editions, 2024). Earning finalist spots for the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize for fiction, the VanderMey Nonfiction Contest, the Lorian Hemingway Prize for Short Fiction, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and others, as well as multiple nominations for Best of the Net, she has a variety of short fiction, memoir, poetry, and critical essays published in dozens of journals, magazines and anthologies. She is currently writing her first YA horror novel.
As an independent scholar, she has presented at The Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Pop Culture Con Denver, and is a regular attendee of StokerCon. Her research focuses on horror cinema, pop culture studies, generational nostalgia, and Gothic literature, all of which she works into her creative writing.
A marathoner and adventure athlete, she is obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cross-country road trips, and her two wildling daughters.
