Milwaukee Noir

Christina Clancy is the author of The Second Home, Shoulder Season, and The Snowbirds (winter, 2025), St. Martin's Press. The Second Home was selected by independent booksellers as an Indie Next and Indie's Introduce pick, and has been optioned by Sony TriStar for a limited series starring Nicolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones. Her novels have been featured on Good Morning America, Buzzfeed, CNN, the New York Post, and elsewhere. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Sun Magazine, The Washington Post, Hobart, Glimmer Train Stories and the Minnesota Review. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. 

Vida Cross is a Cave Canem fellow, a graduate of The School of the Art Institute’s  MFAW program, and a Chicago native who teaches and resides in Milwaukee. Her work has appeared a number of anthologies including: The Creativity and Constraint Anthology, A Civil Rights Retrospective, Tabula Poetica, the Cave Canem Anthology XII: Poems 2008-2009, and The Journal of Film and Video. A 2018 Pushcart nominee, Vida Cross’s book of poetry, Bronzeville at Night:1949, debuted in 2017. 

Tim Hennessy is a bookseller and writer who lives in Milwaukee with his wife and son. His work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Tough, Crimespree Magazine, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, among other places. He is the editor of Milwaukee Noir.

Jennifer Morales is the second-place winner of the 2020 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. She is a poet, fiction writer, and performance artist based in rural Wisconsin. Morales lived in Milwaukee for over twenty years, and served as the city’s first elected Latinx school board member. She’s also been a mom, a doula, a Sunday School teacher, a grantwriter, and an editor for academic and artistic clients around the world. Her short story collection, Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories (UW Press, 2015), was Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 “Book of the Year.” Recent publications include “Cousins,” a short story in Milwaukee Noir  and “The Boy Without a Bike” in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Morales is the president of the board of the Driftless Writing Center in Viroqua.

Nick Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington and won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. His story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. His first novel, The Drifter, won the ITW Thriller and Barry Awards, and was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Hammett Awards. He won the 2016 Literary Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and was named one of Apple’s 10 Writers to Read in 2017.  Light It Up was named the Best Thriller of 2018 by Apple Books and has been nominated for a Barry Award. His books in the Peter Ash series are The Drifter, Burning Bright, Light It Up, Tear It Down, and The Breaker. A husband and father, he has worked as a carpenter, remodeling contractor, and building inspector.  He lives in Milwaukee, where he is hard at work on the next Peter Ash novel.

Mary Thorson was born and raised in Milwaukee, WI. She received her BA in creative writing from UW-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University. She’s been published in various literary journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Shorewood with her husband, daughter, and loud dog.