Christopher M. Cevasco was born in 1972 in New Jersey, where his childhood had little to do with prevailing reality-show depictions of the state and much more to do with tromping through neighboring farmland and wading in creeks after crayfish and tadpoles. Lest this give the false impression Chris was an athletic, outdoorsy type, it should be noted that most of his childhood leisure time was spent in Narnia and Middle Earth. From about the age of eleven, he forced his family to engage in elaborate celebrations of Hobbit Day every September 22.
Also from an early age, Chris developed an interest in history—first drawn to the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica in elementary school. Scott O’Dell’s trilogy of children’s novels, The Captive, The Feathered Serpent, and The Amethyst Ring, helped solidify this interest and were perhaps his first introduction to historical fiction. In high school he came upon Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and James Clavell’s Shōgun, and there was no turning back.
Chris wrote his first “book” some time before kindergarten, a spooky halloween story he illustrated himself and bound with medical tape found in a closet. Since then, he’s never really stopped writing, pausing only to graduate from Rutgers College in 1994 with degrees in Medieval Studies and English and from Emory University School of Law in 1997. He began writing seriously (i.e. submitting what he wrote) around the turn of the millennium and sold his first story two years later. A year after that, he began editing and publishing the award-winning Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction, which ended its thirteen-issue run in 2009. Finally dispensing with the decade-long distraction of being a criminal appeals attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, NY, Chris officially retired from the practice of law in 2007 and began working as a full-time writer. He is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop (the last class at East Lansing, MI) and a 2007 graduate of Taos Toolbox. He was also fortunate enough to have been a member of the Manhattan-based Tabula Rasa writers’ group before moving from NYC forced him to end his tenure with them.
After spending eleven years in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, Chris and his wife moved to Myrtle Beach, SC, with their two young children in the summer of 2010.
Since 2018, Chris has been the assistant series editor to John Joseph Adams, series editor of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
In the summer of 2024, Chris signed a three-book publishing deal with Sapere Books to begin work on a series of historical novels based on the Arthurian legends, tales that have long been near and dear to his heart. His novel Beheld: Godiva’s Story (April 2022 from Lethe Press) is a darkly twisted psychological thriller set in 11th-century England, exploring the legend of Lady Godiva’s naked ride through Coventry. Chris is also currently seeking representation for a war-time resistance thriller set in the years immediately following the Norman Conquest as well as for an alternate history bridging the gap between the indigenous Tuniit people of arctic Greenland and the events of 1066. His research for these and other writing projects have taken him to Greenland, Normandy, and numerous sites in England from Corfe Castle in the south to Orkney in the far north.
When not writing his own fiction, Chris devours the work of Bernard Cornwell, Connie Willis, George R.R. Martin, Ted Chiang, Susanna Clarke, Joe Abercrombie, Tove Jansson, Nnedi Okorafor, Cormac McCarthy, Nicola Griffith, and Emily St. John Mandel, among other favorites. Hands down, his favorite Stooge is Shemp.