Whitney Lakin was born in 1979, just outside of Detroit, Michigan. She started writing as soon as she could pick up a crayon. She spent a good part of grade school scrawling down morbidly comedic ideas when she should have been paying attention to her lessons. If you ask her, she can't count the times she’s heard a teacher say, "Whitney, if it's so funny perhaps you'd like to share it with the class."
Most of the time she did. She thinks she made a few teachers sorry they'd asked. To this day, she continues to write what she writes because it is fun. Macabre and twisted, perhaps, but fun nonetheless—and she wants her readers to have the same experience.
Lakin is fascinated by all things diabolical, and by the dynamic interplay between Heaven and Hell. Questions of modern and ancient religion, dark fantasy, the socially inappropriate and the obscene all figure prominently in her work. Her writing also evinces a strong belief in the absolute necessity of the arts as redemption for the troubled human soul. Inspired by the true-life struggles of Artemisia Gentileschi, Lakin’s first novel, A Paintbrush in the Devil's Toolbox.
is the story of a Detroit-based artist who is commissioned by the Devil to paint a mural in human blood. Her follow-up, Mutiny in Heaven, is about an orphaned angel in search of his origins in New Orleans.
Lakin now lives in New Orleans, where she teaches at Tulane University. She is working on a PhD in French literature of the fantastic and has presented her studies on the literature of addiction at the 2007 NCFS colloquium. Her poetry and short stories have received international recognition, including her contribution in 2007 to The Harrow Anthology, the proceeds of which go to Doctors Without Borders. Spanning the gamut from high to low, Lakin also took first-place in the 2008 World Horror Convention’s annual gross-out storytelling competition. Currently, she is at work on a third novel about morally flexible angels who descend upon the Crescent City for a good time—with apocalyptic repercussions. She promises to keep her readers posted.
