That’s right! We had been waiting to announce this momentous event when we could simultaneously launch our new website with lovely biographies for all us “peeps”, but we’re so excited to introduce our new editor that we’ve decided not to wait.

We really are extremely pleased to welcome Louise Woods to the Yellow Horse stable. Actually, that’s probably not a good analogy. She’s more like one of the trainers, but I digress…

Louise will be providing our Yellow Horse authors with a full suite of editorial services and presented us with one of the most impressive CVs we’d ever seen. Currently working on her PhD in English (on falling in Shakespeare, she tells me) at Jesus College, Cambridge, and with Master of Arts (with distinction) and Master of Philosophy degrees in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, she’s the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Triple Scholarship, The Benefactor’s Prize and the Edwin Stanley Roe Prize from Jesus College.  Louise is an Academic Supervisor in the English Tripos at Cambridge and previously an Admissions examiner at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.

I first met Louise at a Sidney Sussex Vampire Society film screening, so we know she’ll fit in well at Yellow Horse. When I asked her what attracted her to the Vampire Society, she told me she “got hooked pretty quickly on the combination of friendly vampire academics, squashy cushions, red wine and some (admittedly not all) superb vampire films. Essentially, it was an incredibly welcoming atmosphere with the added frisson of horror films and brie.” A nearly perfect combination, indeed.

Louise is a voracious reader with interests in many genres. When pressed, she was able to narrow it down to a rather fascinating ideal: set in the Renaissance, grand tragic themes of passion, sex and death, art, and literature. She cites Shakespeare, of course, but others along the grand tragic Renaissance lines include Tom de Haan, A Mirror for Princes; Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels; and Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series. These are dark, erotic, fantastical works and yet another reason we think she’s the perfect editor for Yellow Horse.

Louise has always wanted to spend her life writing. She has a preference for short stories but tells us that poetry, on the other hand is more daunting: “Particularly after my disastrous first attempt many years ago, when, Pound-like, I prioritised metre and wrote the first line in anapaests. I was devastated by the subsequent realisation that I’d commenced my poetic oeuvre with a line that rhymed pretty closely with “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”" Not to worry, Louise, that’s pretty much the only “poem” I can recite by heart so I would have been well impressed.

Another of Louise’s great loves is dancing. She holds a Half Blue in Latin and Ballroom dancing and choreographed our friend Kevin Jackson’s short film, BITE: Diary of a Vampire Housewife, as well as being scheduled to appear as “vampire-in-waiting” in the sequel. When she told me that “club dancing is missing something when there is nobody with whom to hybridise hip-hop and salsa, or do an impromptu jive to “Build Me Up, Buttercup”", I knew that we were twins separated at birth (with quite a few years in between, but that’s besides the point).

Despite being what she calls a “hypocritical vegetarian” (meaning only that she doesn’t always read the labels on snack foods), Louise amuses herself writing restaurant reviews, which you can see on her website.

Finally, if anyone has a novel they’ve written in Middle English or perhaps a Vernacular Paleography text they’d like to submit, Louise is fluent in both.

Welcome to Yellow Horse, Louise!