This institution, located adjacent to the road cut for the Red Mountain Expressway, allowed staff and visitors to directly inspect the exposed rock and yielded many paleontological discoveries, including Cretaceous mosasaurs, extinct seagoing reptiles that Wright would later specialize in as a scientist. As a teenager, he lived in the Birmingham suburb of Trussville and started volunteering at the now-closed Red Mountain Museum. Wright’s mother was an avid reader of “weird fiction” such as Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker and encouraged him in his interest in the genre. They settled in the municipality of Leeds outside Birmingham, where Wright developed interests in paleontology and herpetology as well as fiction-writing. Wright on May 26, 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, but moved with his mother to Alabama as a small child.

In interviews, she has cited such disparate influences as authors Shirley Jackson and John Steinbeck, Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, the Appalachian folklore stories of Manley Wade Wellman, the films of David Lynch, and the music and lyrics of Michael Stipe, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. Kiernan’s writing typically embraces many genres, including folklore, fairy tales, and elements of the romantic and poetic as well as the macabre. She has also received accolades for her comic books and graphic novels, including the Vertigo series The Dreaming. Her notable works of fiction include her award-winning novels Silk (1998) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) as well as her 2014 collection The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, which won the World Fantasy Award. Although known primarily for her creative work, she has written scholarly articles on mosasaurs and other prehistoric animals recovered from sites in Alabama.

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan (1965- ) is an author and paleontologist best known for writing dark fantasy and science fiction novels, short stories, and comic-book scripts, several of which take place in Birmingham, Jefferson County.

The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan