Until 2006, Maria Alexander lived in California her whole life. In first grade, her granola-eating, guitar-strumming teacher, Miss Liza, instructed the class to write a book by stapling white pieces of paper together and drawing pictures inside. Maria wrote a Kafka-esque story about the little girl who wanted to grow up to be a demon. She blasted half a black crayon drawing a picture of the little girl waking up one morning with delight to find she'd transformed into an obsidian servant of hell.

Maria vaguely remembers a parent-teacher conference transpiring soon thereafter.

Whilst growing up as a classically trained musician, she continued to write stories about preachers falling in love with witches and autophagy (self-cannibalism) at slumber parties. She won many English awards all the way through high school for her refusal to stop being "Mom's weird kid." Despite parental pressures, she majored in English in college and mocked the Communication Studies majors at graduation with jeers of "Get a job!" As an undergraduate, she was accepted into graduate-level fiction writing courses. But instead of attending, she fell on her head and, wobbling from a Jesus-shaped cranial wound, decided to get married and move to Fremont, CA.

For eight years, she was the lead writer and co-owner of Dead Earth Productions, a live-action, Lovecraftian roleplaying game company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Representatives from all the largest RPG companies played in their games, including R. Talsorian, Chaosium and White Wolf. Mark Rein-Hagen asked DEP to put what they were doing in a box. DEP replied, "Coolness just don't fit in boxes, yo." Or something like that.

Then, two significant things happened: first, she had a script produced for a direct-to-video horror anthology called Tales from the Ackermansion. (She's since optioned a script and placed highly in several prestigious screenwriting competitions that apparently no one in Hollywood cares about.) Second, she began working on WorldsAway's Dreamscape as the original World Designer and In-World Storyteller. Randy Farmer, who created the first graphical virtual world for George Lucas in 1987, took her under wing and taught her everything about designing virtual worlds.

At some point, her Jesus-shaped head wound healed and she divorced.

Then two pivotal figures then entered her life: Neil Gaiman, who had a profound influence on her writing through his friendship, correspondence and story draft comments; and Clive Barker, with whom she completed a short film mentorship that led her to move to Los Angeles, where she lives to this day as a recovering blonde with two ungrateful cats. She started selling stories that same year while she was disabled and writing with her voice program, but her fiction and poetry didn't start seeing publication until 2000. Her first year as a member of the Horror Writers Association, two of her stories appeared on the Preliminary Ballot for the 2001 Bram Stoker Award in Short Fiction. Many more appearances followed.

In addition to being an active member of the Horror Writers Association, Maria is an active member of Persephone Writers, an organization devoted to supporting female writers or horror and dark fantasy fiction and poetry.

She still occasionally performs music as Lady Euthanasia, the corseted, Wild Thing-carrying Diva of Darkness who sings Dark Folk for Dark Folk. She can sometimes be found in Hollywood tying up her boyfriend. Her life does not suck.