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Welcome to the Triangle, North Carolina Chapter of Sisters In Crime
The mission of Sisters in Crime is to promote the ongoing advancement, recognition, and professional development of women crime writers. UPCOMING MEETINGS
Saturday, August 8, 2026, at 1:30 pm (EST): Writing Outside Your Lived Experiences with P.M. Raymond and Ashley-Ruth Bernier
Register here. Discover tools for developing a nuanced character or situation for your story that may be a part of communities or situations you have not personally experienced. Learn do's and don'ts for approaching such an endeavor, and why incorporating characters outside your own experience can spark your creativity. For the purposes of this discussion, “Lived experience” refers to the firsthand involvement or direct experiences and choices of a given person, and the knowledge that they gain from it, as opposed to the knowledge a given person gains secondhand or from a mediated source. It is a category of qualitative research together with those that focus on society and culture, and those that focus on language and communication. BIOS: Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier is the author of The Bush Tea Murder, a cozy mystery that was released in April of this year. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Stone’s Throw, Smoking Pen Press, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, Mystery Most Devious, and The Caribbean Writer. Originally from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, she is a writer of contemporary Caribbean mysteries. Ashley-Ruth is a 2023 Derringer nominee (novelette category, Short Mystery Fiction Society), a 2023 and 2024 Killer Nashville Claymore finalist (Best Short Story Collection), and one of the 2024 recipients of MWA’s Barbara Neely grant for Black mystery writers. She is an active member of Sisters in Crime, Crime Writers of Color, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, Mystery Writers of America, and the North Carolina Writers Network. Ashley-Ruth currently lives with her husband and four children in North Carolina, where she teaches first grade and finds very few things more valuable than uninterrupted writing time. P.M. Raymond P.M. Raymond hails from New Orleans, Louisiana so she knows a thing or two about good gumbo, grits, and café au lait. She currently lives on the East Coast with 27 cookbooks and an imaginary dog named Walter. She is a Top 10 Finalist in the 2024 Killer Shorts Screenplay Competition, a Claymore Awards Top Pick, and named to the 160 Black Women in Horror in 2023. Her work has appeared in Punk Noir, Flash Fiction Magazine, Kings River Life Magazine, Dark Fire Fiction, Pyre Magazine, The Furious Gazelle, and Dark Yonder. Things are as They Should be and Other Words to Die For, her collection of Southern noir stories was released in April of this year.
Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 1:30 pm (EST): Killing Me Softly: Writing the Cozy Mystery with Lynn Cahoon
Is writing the cozy mystery in your wheelhouse? Anthony nominated, New York Times, and USA Today bestselling author of several cozy mystery series, Lynn Cahoon, will walk you through the cozy promise to the reader so you can determine if writing a cozy mystery is for you. Participants will learn the requirements of a cozy mystery –a story low on gore, low on sex, and high on fun. Think David Addison and Maddie Hayes in Moonlighting, Remington Steele and Laura Holt, or Richard Castle and Kate Beckett in Castle (before the last season). The importance of a cozy setting, the cast of quirky secondary characters, and, most importantly, the why behind a good series. Finally, we’ll answer the most important question haunting the cozy mystery world today. How can so many dead bodies show up in one little town? We may also learn how many licks it takes to get to the middle of that famous sucker or maybe the world may never know. BIO - NYT and USA Today bestselling author, Lynn Cahoon is a multi-published writer with years of experience training and presenting to groups in various day jobs. An Idaho native, her stories focus on the depth and experience of small-town life, including the required murder. Currently, she’s living in a small Eastern Tennessee town where her imagination tends to wander. In 2013, she published her first cozy mysteries for Kensington Publishing and has continued developing cozy worlds, including the Tourist Trap series, the Cat Latimer series, the Farm to Fork series, the Kitchen Witch series, and the Survivors’ Book Club series. She recently released a new series set in Bainbridge and is writing a new series set deep in the North Carolina mountains. She’s now a hybrid author, self-publishing another fun paranormal cozy and taking back the Cat Latimer series to keep the books flowing. A fifteen-plus-year breast cancer survivor, she blames her love of cozy mysteries on the extensive waiting time in doctors’ offices. Register here. Saturday, October 10, 2026, at 1:30 pm (EST): Triangle Sisters in Crime Author's Panel
Register here. GOT A QUESTION ABOUT A PROGRAM? EMAIL [email protected] Want to know what our chapter members have been up to?
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us on Facebook MEETINGS: Triangle Sisters in Crime meets virtually. The meetings are open to the public. If you miss any of the virtual meetings and the chapter has been given permission to share the recording online, you can find them here. Once you register, instructions on how to attend will be sent via email. If you're not already signed up to receive our monthly emails, you can sign up here. |
