Alexis Powell writes scary stories for kids who want to be scared. Her debut collection A Coven of Witches: Spellbinding Tales of Magic and Myth (Gibbs Smith, July 2026), illustrated by Marina Vidal, gathers twenty original tales built around witches pulled from folklore, myth, and history — Baba Yaga, Circe, Marie Laveau, La Lechuza, the Salem witch trials. A girl unwraps a Christmas gift far worse than coal. A substitute teacher turns unruly students into pigs. A train ride turns deadly.

Powell holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a certificate in publishing from the Denver Publishing Institute, and the collection is built with a teacher’s care as much as a storyteller’s. Every tale comes with a fright-level meter so a reader can pick their own limit, and a page of back matter on the real folkloric figure behind it. In her introduction, Powell makes the point that the people accused of witchcraft across history were most often the ones already pushed to the edges of their communities. Kirkus Reviews called the results “deliciously terrifying.”

She lives in San Diego with her partner, a great many plants, and a pet snake named Sycamore. Join her in the Children’s Room at the Salt Lake Book Festival for stories best read with someone else in the room.