Inspired by volunteering for RE/Search Publications, Rhoads and her husband Mason Jones founded Automatism Press in 1993. Automatism published two anthologies, Lend the Eye a Terrible Aspect and Death's Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, before she created Morbid Curiosity in 1997. The magazine, which published true first-person confessional essays, was a Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in 2004. In 2006, Rhoads shut downMorbid Curiosity magazine to concentrate on her own writing. Her first big break came when her story "Still Life with Shattered Glass" took third place in the Fiction Contest at the 2005 World Horror Convention and was later published in Cemetery Dance magazine. That led in 2008 to the publication of four of her stories in Sins of the Sirens: 14 Tales ofDark Desire edited by John Everson for Dark Arts Books. Rhoads edited Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual, a collection of her favorite essays from Morbid Curiosity magazine, for Scribner in 2009. She subsequently edited anthologies for Damnation Books and Tomes & Coffee Press. Her first novel, co-written with Brian Thomas, was published by Black Bed Sheet Books in 2014, followed by a space-opera trilogy published by Night Shade Books in 2015.
Cemetery Work
In November 1997, Rhoads began writing a monthly column about visiting cemeteries for Gothic.Net. Many of those essays were collected into a cemetery memoir called Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, first published by Western Legends Publishing in 2013. She began blogging at CemeteryTravel.com in February 2011, which led to 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers in 2017. Rhoads has written about cemeteries for Mental Floss, Legacy.com, The Daily Beast, The Cemetery Club, Gothic Beauty, the Association for Gravestone Studies, the Horror Writers Association, among others. She lectured about cemeteries at the Death Salon, Reimagine End of Life, the San Francisco Lit Crawl, StokerCon, the SFWA Nebula Conference, and on NPR. She continues to advocate for the preservation of historic cemeteries.
