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Samantha Bryant (born April 28, 1971, née Dunaway) is an American speculative fictionauthor. Bryant won a Jacquis Award for feminist writing from Legendary Women in 2015 for her debut novel, Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel. She is also known for her work as an educator.

Early Life and Education
Bryant was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest of two daughters of Patricia (née Lindsley) Dunaway, a homemaker, and Joseph Dunaway, a mechanic and Master Chief in the United States Navy. Her mother had selected the name of her future daughter long before she even met her husband.

By the time Bryant was three years old, her family had settled in Bellevue, Kentucky, the city her father had grown up in. From an early age, Bryant had a strong interest in reading and writing, crafting her earliest poems as a student at Grandview Elementary School, at the encouragement of Mrs. Alsdorf, her first grade teacher.

Bryant lived in Bellevue with her parents and her younger sister, Jennifer Broenner (née Dunaway), until she graduated from Bellevue High School in 1989. In high school, she participated in the band and chorus programs, and played for the tennis team.

Bryant attended Morehead State University where she earned a Bachelor's degree in English and Education with minors in Spanish, Creative Writing, and Honors. While in college, she helped develop a student coffeehouse known as FAN (Fine Arts Network) as a way for Morehead Students to showcase their work, served as an officer in the Honors Program, worked on Inscape (the student literary magazine), and worked a few hours a week at WMKY.

Some years later, Bryant was awarded a fellowship and attended the Bread Loaf School of Englis h at Middlebury College, earning her MA in English in 2001.

Teaching Career
After college graduation in 1993, Bryant moved with her then-husband Mark Gillespie to Kodiak, Alaska. The pair spent the rest of the 1990s in Kodiak, Kenny Lake, and Nome, Alaska. In Kodiak, Samantha worked as a secretary for the Alaska Draggers Association, a receptionist, a librarian at Kodiak Public Library, a day care provider and a teacher's aide at Kodiak High School.

Later, she became a public school teacher at Kenny Lake School, and then Nome-Beltz High School. She worked with middle and high school students, teaching a variety of English and Spanish classes, as well as occasional electives like drama, journalism, and music. Samantha eventually worked as a teacher for public schools for 27 years.

The next few years involved several moves after she divorced and remarried. She lived in Emporia, Kansas, teaching at Madison High School; then in Bellevue Kentucky, teaching at Campbell County High School and Ockerman Middle School; then in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, teaching at Riverside High; and ended her teaching career at A.L. Stanback Middle School in her new hometown of Hillsborough, NC.

Writing Career
Bryant began as a poet, branching out into nonfiction essays in her 20s. Writing took a backseat when she started a family, but she came back to it in her 30s, in part as a coping mechanism when she suffered from Postpartum Depression after the birth of her second child. She joined a local writing critique group in hopes of building some discipline as a writer.

When she turned 42, Bryant decided it was time to take things seriously, and she committed to a daily writing habit, using a spreadsheet tool called The Magic Spreadsheet to track her work. She finished her first novel (His Other Mother, women's fiction, unpublished) in 2013, and immediately set to work on what would become Going Through the Change, the first novel in the Menopausal Superhero series.

Going Through the Change was published in 2015 by Curiosity Quills Press, a now-defunct small publisher. When CQ folded, Bryant contracted with Falstaff Books of Charlotte, NC, which has re-published the series and the new entries in it, starting in 2019.

In addition to her novels, Bryant write short stories, mostly horror and has written nonfiction reviews and articles for GeekDad, Peer Reviewed, and Bookish Fangirl.

Personal Life
Bryant is married to Travis Bryant, a user experience designer and gamer. The two met when they were both college students, but didn't date until many years later. They have two children, two rescue dogs, and a corn snake and enjoy a quiet life in Hillsborough, NC.

Menopausal Superhero series:

 * Going Through the Change, book 1, published 2015, 2019
 * Friend or Foe, novella, book 1.5, published 2020
 * Change of Life, book 2, published 2016, 2019
 * The Good Will Tour, novella, book 2.5, published 2020
 * Face the Change, book 3, published 2017, 2019
 * Through Thick or Thin, short story collection, published 2020
 * Agents of Change, compilation of novellas and short stories, published 2020
 * Be the Change, book 4, published, 2021

Anthologized Short Stories:

 * "Smoke Scream" in Selfies from the End of the World by Mad Scientist Journal, 2015
 * "Goldilocks" in Seven Story House by Winterfield Press, 2016
 * "Intervention" in Theme-thology: Mad Science from HDWPBooks, 2016
 * "Friend or Foe" in Indomitable Ten: A Superhero/Supervillain Novella Anthology (out of print) from Curiosity Quills, 2016
 * "Underestimated" in The Good Fight 3: Sidekicks (out of print) from Local Hero Press, 2017
 * "Flygirl's Second Chance" in Love Unlimited (out of print) compiled by Lizbeth Durano, 2017
 * "The Girl in the Pool" in Off the Beaten Path 3 by Prospective Press, 2018
 * "Coming Out as Leonel" in The Good Fight 4: Homefront (out of print) from Local Hero Press, 2018
 * "Ashes" in Beyond the Pane" by Winterfield Press, 2018
 * "If the Moon is Real" in Corvid-19: A RavenCon anthology by Big Blind Productions, 2019
 * "O Scaly Night" in Christmas Lites IX compiled by Amy Huntley, 2019
 * "The Gleewoman of Preservation" in Deadman Humour: 13 Fears of a Clown by Abstruse Press, 2019
 * "Lawn Wars" in New Accelerator: Anthology 1 by Manicgrin Media Ltd, 2019
 * "The Cleaning Lady" in Stories We Tell After Midnight, Vol. 2 by Crone Girls Press, 2020
 * "His Destroyer" in Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire by Mocha Memoirs Press, 2020
 * "Margaret Lets Her Self Go" in Outsiders Within by Abstruse Press, 2020
 * "I Should Have Known" in Hindsight's 2020 edited by Tyrolin Puxty, 2020
 * "How Does Your Garden Grow?" in A Woman Unbecoming by Crone Girls Press, 2022
 * "What I Can See" in Beyond: Horror Flash Fiction by Great Void Books, 2022
 * "No Country for Young Women" in POST ROE Alternatives: Fighting Back by B Cubed Press, 2022

Nonfiction Works:

 * "Plenty of Fish in the Sea" in The Insecure Writer's Support Group Guide to Publishing and Beyond from Dancing Lemur Press, 2014
 * "Have Patience, Young Grasshopper" in The Insecure Writer's Support Group: Writing for Profit from Dancing Lemur Press, 2017
 * "Nightmares and Dreamscapes" in Tracing The Trails: A Constant Reader's Reflections on the Work of Stephen King by Charles A. Clark, 2018

Short Stories:

 * The Beginning of You. 34 Orchard. 10 November 2022.
 * Under an Orange Sky. Allegory EZine. 1 November 2022.
 * Poison. Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast. 8 September 2022.
 * Moondance. Night's End Podcast 13 June 2022. (my story begins about 7 minutes, 12 seconds in)
 * The Mind Plays Tricks Dark Recesses 27 April 2022
 * How Does Your Garden Grow The Fantastic Other, Issue 4 (page 13)  19 February 2022
 * Boy Chick on Apex & Abyss 1 October 2021
 * Wonderboy's Last Fight on Suddenly, and Without Warning. 17 November 2020.
 * Rorschach's Ceiling on Every Day Fictio n. February 5, 2020
 * Patricia Saves the Beauty Queen on FreedomFiction. April 4, 2014.