When she’s not writing, Alexandria is usually planning her next trip—most often to New Orleans, a city she never quite gets tired of, or to Galveston Island, where nostalgia and historic charm tend to pull her back.

She gravitates toward thought-provoking novels and psychological thrillers, having always been more interested in the messier sides of morality and the human psyche than in stories that wrap everything up in a bow.

She maintains an unbreakable karaoke loyalty to “Gimme Three Steps” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and is firmly convinced that her dad’s gumbo could fix at least some of life’s problems—if not most of them.

Meet the Author

Alexandria “A.M.” Vaňková grew up in East Texas, somewhere between the pine trees and the Louisiana Border. During college, she split her time between psychology classes and working at her uncle’s crawfish business—both, in their own way, studies in human behavior.

Now based just outside Austin, she’s working toward her Ph.D. while writing the All Hungry Gods Wear Red Cycle—Southern Gothic thrillers about power, obsession, and the beautiful mess between justice and guilt.

Book Recommendations

  • Diary of an Oxygen Thief

    By Anonymous

    "I knew from the first sentence this wasn’t going to be gentle. Bleak, intimate, uncomfortable—just a raw spiral of ego, cruelty, and control."

  • The Masque of the Red Death

    By Edgar Allen Poe

    “I read The Masque of the Red Death in 7th grade English, and it was my first real dive into symbolism. It showed me stories can mean more than what’s on the page.”

  • Call Me By Your Name

    By André Aciman

    “Call Me By Your Name nails that first-love ache—too intense to feel real, impossible to forget. The writing is unconventional in the best way, like you’re inside the main character’s head the whole time.”

  • Sharp Objects

    By Gillian Flynn

    “Sharp Objects is Southern Gothic and deeply psychological—obsessed with the darker sides of womanhood, power, and buried truths. One of the best modern psych thrillers I’d read in a long time, and that ending had me reeling.”

  • The Apocrypha

    By Various Authors

    “I was raised in a very black-and-white religion, but by my first world lit class I was already falling in love with symbolism. Reading the Pentateuch and Apocrypha as literature—not doctrine—kind of blew my mind.”

  • The Great Gatsby

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “The Great Gatsby sealed my love for allegory and symbolism back in high school. Messy people playing elegant, rot under all that decadence—and I’ll always side with the theory that Zelda Fitzgerald contributed more than history likes to admit.”

  • Carmilla

    By J. Sheridan LeFanu

    “I read Carmilla because my sister knew I loved Dracula, and it reset the bar permanently. The prose, the characters, the sapphic energy—nothing else has really compared. If you’ve read my first book, you get it.”