Samantha Allen is the author of the horror comedy Patricia Wants to Cuddle (Zando, 2022), the forthcoming romance novel Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet (Zando, 2024), and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States (Little, Brown, 2019), a travelogue that the New York Times Book Review called “a powerful book of memoir and reportage.” Real Queer America won the Judy Turner Prize for Community Service at the Decatur Book Festival.

Samantha’s other publications include M to (WT)F (Audible Originals, 2020) and Love & Estrogen (Amazon Original Stories, 2018). Samantha has discussed her books on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and C-SPAN’s “Book TV,”  as well as several radio programs and podcasts.

Samantha is also a GLAAD-Award winning journalist and editor, previously covering LGBTQ+ stories as a senior reporter for The Daily Beast and as a staff writer for Fusion. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, CNN, and more.

In 2018, she received the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism Article, and she was nominated in the same category in both 2019 and 2020. In 2021, she won two awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists: an Excellence in Political Coverage award and a shared honor for Excellence in Business Coverage. Samantha has discussed her reporting on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR’s On the Media.

Samantha also holds a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies from Emory University, where she received a George W. Woodruff Fellowship. In 2013, she received the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington. When not working on her next book, Samantha co-hosts the You Should See The Other Guy podcast.