Samantha Allen is the author of the horror comedy Patricia Wants to Cuddle (Zando, 2022), the supernatural romance 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 the audio-exclusive M to (WT)F (Audible Originals, 2020) and the e-book Love & Estrogen (Amazon Original Stories, 2018), as well as essays in anthologies like Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022). Samantha has discussed her work as an author 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. In 2024, she won an additional shared NLGJA award for Excellence in Bisexual Coverage. Samantha has discussed her reporting on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR’s On the Media.

Samantha holds a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies from Emory University, where she was a George W. Woodruff scholar. In 2013, she received the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington.