R. Michael Burns is an October child with a background in philosophy, theater and other occult arts. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers Group, and the Gainesville Fiction Writers Group.

His fiction has appeared in various magazines and e-zines, including Dreams of Decadence, City Slab, Dark Regions, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Dark Recesses, Lovecraft's Weird Mysteries, The Shroud, and Arkham Tales, as well as in the anthologies Orphans of the Storm, Bell, Book & Beyond, Cthulhu Express, Extremes 5, Goodbye, Darwin, Bound for Evil, and Horror Library III. He has other fiction forthcoming in the e-zine Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. His article "Creative Writing 301" was picked in a Predators and Editors poll as the second-best non-fiction article of 2006.

A Colorado native, he lived for the better part of five years in Japan, where he taught English to Japanese students from 1 to 70. He currently resides in the dark swamps of Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches high school English, runs the Creative Writing Workshop an the Japanese Pop Culture Club, and coaches speech and debate.

EYES OF A STRANGER (short story) - A dark yet brilliant artist becomes fixated on a young woman he spies at an exhibition, but it quickly becomes unclear which of them is the seducer, and which the seduced. Originally published in Dreams of Decadence magazine, Issue #6, Spring 1998.

CELIA (short story) - 'Celia' appears in the anthology Bell, Book & Beyond, edited by P.D. Cacek, from the Design Image Group.

GASLIGHT AND SHADOWS (short story) - An actress learns just how much she's willing to give to her art. First published on the DNA Publications website in Summer 2000.

THE GALLERY (short story) - A young woman hunting for her missing boyfriend crosses paths with an artist whose work truly transcends life and death... This story originally appeared in the online magazine Dark Recesses.