Christina Hoag
A former journalist, Christina Hoag has had her laptop searched by Colombian guerrillas, phone tapped in Venezuela, was suspected of drug trafficking in Guyana, hid under a car to evade Guatemalan soldiers, and posed as a nun to report from inside a Caracas jail.​
She has interviewed gang members, bank robbers, thieves and thugs in prisons, shantytowns and slums, not to forget billionaires and presidents, some of whom fall into the previous categories. Now she writes about such characters in her fiction.
Her noir crime novel Skin of Tattoos was a finalist for the Silver Falchion Award for suspense, while her YA thriller Girl on the Brink was named one of Suspense Magazine’s Best of YA. The Blood Room, a detective mystery, is a police-procedural top seller on Audible.
Her nonfiction book, Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence, is used as a textbook in several universities. Her essays and short fiction have been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Lunch Ticket, Toasted Cheese, Other Side of Hope, and Shooter, and have been recognized with several awards. Her short noir fiction has appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Black Cat Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Guilty Crime Story, All Due Respect, Rock and a Hard Place, Dark Yonder, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as Crimeucopia, Black Beacon Mystery and Vigilante Crime anthologies.
A graduate of Boston University, she's a former staff writer for the Miami Herald and Associated Press, and wrote from Latin America for Time, Business Week, The New York Times, Financial Times, Sunday Times of London, Houston Chronicle and other news outlets. Early in her career, she won prizes for enterprise reporting and interpretive writing from the New Jersey Press Association.
A native of New Zealand, Christina grew up as an expat around the world. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she has volunteered as a creative writing instructor at a maximum-security prison and to underserved teen girls and as a domestic violence support group facilitator.