Brittany Stepniak

Brittany Stepniak writes speculative fiction with commercial hooks told through a poetic, literary lens. Her debut novel, What We Become, blends Appalachian-gothic atmosphere with near-future biotech and psychological suspense, asking how far we’ll go to rewrite our past—and what it costs to do so.

She grew up hiking the Appalachian Mountains and studied English and psychology at Roanoke College before building a career as a science writer and editor with Johns Hopkins University, Chemical & Engineering News, and Albemarle Magazine. She later left financial publishing in Baltimore city to raise her children in the countryside, where she continues to write stories fueled by both the shadows of trauma and the resilience of spirit.

Her fiction lingers in the liminal spaces between reality and illusion, memory and dream, the beautiful and the macabre. She leans into existential, character-driven explorations of what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms and the relentless pursuit of perfection.