Elgin Award-winning author Holly Lyn Walrath (called "Houston's premier horror poet" by the Houston Press) was born and raised in a Baptist household in Garland, Texas. She graduated in 2007 from the University of Texas - Austin with a B.A. in English, and received a Master of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing degree from the University of Denver in 2015. That same year saw the first publication of her works, including the story "The Last Man on Earth" in the online flash fiction journal Grievous Earth and the poem "A Red Sky" in the online Vine Leaves Literary Journal. Since then, Walrath has published a large number of short stories, pieces of flash fiction, and poems.

Walrath published her first collection of poetry, Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press), in 2018. As A.J, Odasso, the senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons noted, “Glimmerglass Girl delights and chills the senses in equal measure, deceptively minute in its scope. Walrath challenges preconceived notions of feminine identity in these delicate, uncanny poems—and spares nobody, no body, in the process.” The collection won the 2019 Elgin Award for Best Chapbook from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She had a collection published in Italian in 2020, Numinose Lapidi (Kipple Press), which was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. The English translation of that collection - of horror poems written in the pantoum form - was published in April 2023 by Aqueduct Press as Numinous Stones. Walrath's most recent collection was The Smallest of Bones, released in 2021 by Clash Books and a 2021 Elgin Award nominee. The collection explores "a wide range of topics such as love, romance, relationships, queer sexuality, religion, death, demons, ghosts, bones, gender, and darkness."

Walrath's science fiction-, fantasy-, and horror-related work has appeared in many different venues, including 365 Tomorrows, Luna Station Quarterly, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Sunday Morning Transport, Abyss & Apex, Dreams & Nightmares, StarLine, and Eye of the Telescope* (an issue of which Walrath guest-edited in 2018), among many others. Her 2020 poem "Yes, Antimatter Is Real" was nominated for the 2021 Dwarf Stars Award from the SFPA, and she has had numerous poems nominated for the SFPA's Rhysling Award.

Walrath is also an editor - in 2019 she launched Interstellar Flight Press, an indie speculative fiction publishing company focusing on underrepresented genres and authors. She has edited 9 books for IFP as of 2022, including several that have won major industry awards.

After residing in Colorado for 8 years, and Austin for nearly 19 years, Walrath moved to and currently resides in Houston, TX.