Derek Nikitas is the author of two thriller novels, Pyres and The Long Division. His debut novel Pyres (St. Martin's Minotaur)was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author and has been optioned for film adaptation by Vox3 Films.  The Long Division will be released by Minotaur Books on October 27th, 2009.

Derek was raised in New Hampshire and Western New York, where his first two novels take place. He received his undergrad degree in English from the State University of New York College at Brockport. Later, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina
at Wilmington, and he's currently pursuing an English PhD at Georgia State University. He has also been a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the brief residency MFA Program at Eastern Kentucky
University in Richmond, Kentucky.

His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Ontario Review, Chelsea, New South, and other print periodicals. He has also published stories online at Thuglit,   Plots with Guns, Pulp Pusher, Sublit, and The Pedestal Magazine. He has written stories for the Killer Year: Stories to Die For anthology (St. Martin's Minotaur, 2008) and for the forthcoming zombie anthology, The New Dead (Griffin Books, Feb 2010). Derek's short story writing in The Ontario Review earned him a Pushcart Prize nomination from Joyce Carol Oates.