I’m so excited to welcome Dino Parenti to the Arterial Bloom anthology! I was fortunate to meet Dino through Gamut Magazine, and he has greatly enriched my life as a friend, coworker, and author. His story “Blue Was Her Favorite Color” is absolutely phenomenal. It’s eerie, sad, and sinister. I can’t wait until you can all read it.

The facts remain muddy to this day, and I couldn’t remember who saw what when, but someone claimed to have spotted Justin’s little form, etched by lightning strike, arms out in airplane liftoff mode, waddling through rain and tall grass until suddenly he couldn’t be seen anymore.

-Dino Parenti, “Blue Was Her Favorite Color”

Dino Parenti is a writer of dark literary and speculative fiction. He is the winner of the first annual Lascaux Review flash fiction contest and is featured in the Anthony Award winning anthology Blood on the Bayou.  His work can be found in Pantheon Magazine, Menacing Hedge, Pithead Chapel, as well as other anthologies. He is a fiction editor at Gamut Magazine and a member of the HWA. His short-fiction collection, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories, is now out with Crystal Lake Publishing.

When not purging his soul into a laptop thanks to a far-too-early exposure to Stephen King, Scorsese movies, and Camus, he can be found photographing the odd junk pile, building furniture, or earning a few bucks as a CAD drafter. He lives in Los Angeles.