Darrell Schweitzer is the author of the novels The White Isle (Fantastic, April and July 1980; Owlswick Press, 1990), The Shattered Goddess (Starblaze/The Donning Company, 1983), and The Mask of the Sorcerer (NEL, 1995; expanded from the novella "To Become a Sorcerer," finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 1992). His short fiction career has produced eight collections so far, We Are All Legends (Starblaze/The Donning Company, 1981), Tom O'Bedlam's Night Out (W. Paul Ganley, 1985), Transients (W. Paul Ganley, 1993; finalist for the World Fantasy Award, Necromancies and Netherworlds (with Jason Van Hollander) (Wildside Press, 1999; finalized for the World Fantasy Award), Refugees from an Imaginary Country (W. Paul Ganley/Owlswick Press, 1999), Nightscapes: Tales of the Ominous and Magical (Wildside Press, 2000), The Great World and the Small: More Tales of the Ominous and Magical (Cosmos Books/Wildside Press, 2001), and Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer (Wildside Press, 2004), as well as the chapbook collection The Meaning of Life and Other Awesome Cosmic Revelations (Borgo Press, 1989). His novella Living with the Dead (PS Publishing, 2008) is a finalist for this year's Shirley Jackson Award.

Highlights of his uncollected short fiction — he is the author of almost three hundred short stories — include "How It Ended" in The Year's Best Fantasy 3 (ed. David Hartwell), "The Fire Eggs" in The Year's Best Science Fiction 6 (ed. David Hartwell), "The Dead Kid" in The Living Dead (ed. John Joseph Adams), "Sherlock Holmes: Dragonslayer" in The Resurrected Holmes (ed. Marvin Kaye), "The Adventure of the Hanoverian Vampires" in Crafty Cat Crimes (ed. Martin Greenberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz & Robert Weinberg), "Some Hitherto Unpublished Correspondence of the Younger Pliny" in The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits (ed. Mike Ashley), "The Stolen Venus" in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (October 2008), "The Rider of the Dark" in Frontier Cthulhu (ed. William Jones), "Why We Do It" in Dead But Dreaming (ed. Kevin Ross & Keith Herbert), "Fighting the Zeppelin Gang" in Postscripts #8, "The Headless Horseman of Paoli" in Haunted America (ed. Marvin Kaye), "A Lost City of the Jungle" in Astounding Hero Tales (ed. James Lowder), "Saxon Midnight" in The Doom of Camelot (ed. James Lowder), "The Last of the Giants of Albion" in Legends of the Pendragon (ed. James Lowder), with an extended et cetera following after.

His most recently published short fiction is "O King of Pain and Splendor!" (a new Sekenre the Sorcerer tale) in Postscripts 21/22, a.k.a. Edison's Frankenstein (ed. Peter Crwother and Nick Gevers).

As a poet, Schweitzer is probably best known for rhyming "Cthulhu" in a limerick. Despite this, he has twice been nominated for the Rhysling Award and won the Asimov's SF Reader's Award for Best Poem of 2006 for "Remembering the Future." His two volumes of serious poetry are Groping Toward the Light (Wildside Press, 2000) and Ghosts of Past and Future (Wildside Press, 2009), and his several somewhat frivolous chapbooks Non Compost Mentis (Zadok Allen, 1995), Poetica Dementia (Zadok Allen, 1997), Stop Me Before I Do It Again! (Zadok Allen, 1999), They Never Found the Head: Poems of Sentiment and Reflection (Zadok Allen, 2001), The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal (Zadok Allen, 2004), and The Arkham Alphabet Book: Being a Compilation of Life's Lessons in Rhyme for Squamous Spawn, (Zadok Allen, 2006).

His nonfiction includes Lovecraft in the Cinema (T-K Graphics, 1975), The Dream Quest of H.P. Lovecraft (Borgo Press, 1978), Conan's World and Robert E. Howard (Borgo Press, 1978), Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (with S.T. Joshi) (Scarecrow Press, 1989), and two books of essays, Windows of the Imagination (Wildside Press, 1998) and The Fantastic Horizon (Wildside Press, 2009). With George Scithers and John M. Ford he co-authored On Writing Science Fiction: The Editors Strike Back (Owlswick Press, 1981). He has edited the non-fiction anthologies or critical symposia Exploring Fantasy Worlds (Borgo Press, 1985), Discovering H.P. Lovecraft (as Essays Lovecraftian, T-K Graphics, 1975; 25^th anniversary edition, Wildside Press, 2001), Discovering Stephen King (Borgo Press, 1985), Discovering Modern Horror 1 (Borgo Press, 1985), Discovering Modern Horror 2 (Borgo Press, 1988), Discovering Classic Horror (Borgo Press, 1992), Discovering Classic Fantasy (Borgo Press, 1996), The Thomas Ligotti Reader (Wildside Press, 2003), The Robert E. Howard Reader (Wildside Press, 2007), and The Neil Gaiman Reader (Wildside Press, 2007).

He has edited two volumes of rare material by Lord Dunsany, The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer (Owlswick Press, 1980) and The Ginger Cat and Other Lost Plays (Wildside Press, 2004).

As an editor of fiction, he was an assistant on Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine between 1977 and 1982, on Amazing Stories (1982 — 86) and as co-editor (and occasionally sole editor) of Weird Tales (1988 — 2007). With George Scithers he co-edited two anthologies, Tales from the Spaceport Bar (Avon, 1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (Avon, 1989). With Martin H. Greenberg, he edited The Secret History of Vampires (DAW, 2007), Cthulhu's Reign (DAW, 2010), and Full Moon City (Gallery Books, 2010). Weird Trails: The Magazine of Supernatural Cowboy Stories, April 1933 (Wildside Press, 2004) was actually an original anthology disguised as a pulp magazine facsimile. He won the World Fantasy Award as co-editor of Weird Tales in 1992.

His SF Voices (T-K Graphics, 1976) was, he later determined, only the second book of author interviews published in SF. (It was preceded by Paul Walker's Speaking of Science Fiction in 1975). His other interview books are: SF Voices 1 (Borgo Press, 1979), SF Voices 5 (Borgo Press, 1980), Speaking of Horror (Borgo Press, 1994), Speaking of the Fantastic (Wildside Press, 2002) and Speaking of the Fantastic 2 (Wildside Press, 2004).

Immediately forthcoming are future volumes of Speaking of Horror and Speaking of the Fantastic, plus the much-delayed The Robert E. Howard Reader. Other forthcoming works include three stories sold to Postscripts, one to Cemetery Dance, one to S.T. Joshi's anthology Black Wings, and one to Space & Time, as well as Echoes of the Goddess, a much overdue volume of stories in the same setting as The Shattered Goddess (originally announced by the Donning Co. in the 1980s) These days he has an interview in every issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, the author and singer Mattie Brahen, and with the requisite number of literary cats.