Brittany Stepniak

Brittany Stepniak writes speculative fiction with commercial hooks told through a 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 scribbling poetry and hiking the Appalachian Mountains. After studying English and psychology at Roanoke College, she wrote for the award-winning Albemarle Magazine before moving to Baltimore, where she pursued graduate coursework in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. She built a career in writing and marketing with Chemical & Engineering News and The Agora Companies. She eventually left the city to raise her children in the countryside, where the quiet landscape continues to shape stories rooted in both the shadows of trauma and the resilience of spirit.

Her fiction lingers in the liminal spaces between reality and illusion, memory and dream—exploring what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by powerful entities and algorithms that often obscure truth.