Publishers Weekly reports editor and writer Chantelle Aimée Osman has died, aged 45. A cause of death was not given. A senior editor at Simon & Schuster’s audiobook imprint Simon Maverick, Osman was best-known to comic book readers for serving as a creative consultant on Mad Cave’s Dick Tracy series (2024-), and co-writing the book’s Valentine’s Day Special and Halloween Special in 2025, which made her the first woman to write a Dick Tracy comic.
Osman initially trained as a lawyer at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College, before working as a lobbyist, and in the business side of the film industry. After becoming editor-in-chief of RT Book Reviews magazine in 2015, she worked as an acquiring editor at Amazon Publishing, and then co-founded the Polis Books imprint Agora, which focused on crime and horror books from unique social and cultural perspectives.
Further credits included writing the Zestworld titles The Awakened and InterPop’s The Rejects (both with Dick Tracy co-writers Alex Segura and Michael Moreci); the non-fiction writing manuals The Quick and Dirty Guides to…; short fiction; and editing multiple anthologies, including PM Press’s Jewish Noir II. She was also a professor at the Long Island University Brooklyn Polk School of Communication MFA in Writing and Publishing, and served on the Race Equity & Social Justice Committee of the Pongo Poetry Project, and on the board of the non-profit Prototype Health.
Three of the books she edited won International Latino Book Award medals, and she was also nominated for Edgar, Stoker, Dagger, Anthony, Strand Critics, Macavity, and Lefty Awards; she was also named a Publishers Weekly Rising Star honoree in 2020. Writer Bryan Young was among those who paid tribute to her while expressing shock at the news, and author Tori Eldridge and librarian Lesa Holstine posted individual tributes to her. Eldridge says, “Chantelle was one of those rare people who changed lives and positively impacted the literary community and everyone within her reach. Her absence leaves a hole that may take all of us to fill.”
In lieu of flowers, donations have been asked to be made to the Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. A fundraiser in Osman’s memory has also been launched by Prototype Health. Her last work, the Dick Tracy Veterans Day Special, will be released this week.
