Chantelle Aimée Osman

Publishers Weekly announced on 5 November 2026 that Chantelle Aimée Osman had died at the age of 45. No place or cause of death was reported. Chris Lynch, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio, told staff she had been an integral part of Simon Maverick's early development and had always championed work from underrepresented writers.

Writers and readers including Bryan Young, Tori Eldridge and the librarian Lesa Holstine paid tribute. Eldridge wrote that she was one of those rare people who changed lives and positively impacted the literary community. In lieu of flowers, donations were requested to the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, and Prototype Health launched a fundraiser in her memory.

Chantelle Aimée Osman trained as a lawyer at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Before moving into publishing she worked as a lobbyist and on the business side of the film industry, and she later joked about being a recovering lawyer.

Osman became editor in chief of RT Book Reviews magazine in 2015. She then helped found Agora Books, an imprint of Polis Books dedicated to crime fiction and horror from unique social and cultural voices, acquiring and editing authors including John Vercher, Cynthia Pelayo, Gabino Iglesias and Tori Eldridge.

She went on to be an acquiring editor at Amazon Publishing, working with authors such as Robert Dugoni, Mark Sullivan, Suzanne Redfearn and Simon Tolkien. In 2025 she joined Simon Maverick, Simon & Schuster's new audio first imprint, as senior editor, acquiring titles including Alexander Boldizar's The Man Who Saw Seconds and Ride or Die Girl, Ang T. Dalton's Twisted Thorn trilogy, Hanna Harp's Haunting the Hunter and E. Salvador's Please Don't Go.

Books she edited won International Latino Book Award medals and were nominated for the Edgar, Bram Stoker, Dagger, Anthony, Strand Critics, Macavity and Lefty awards. Publishers Weekly named her a Star Watch honoree in 2020.

As a writer she co-wrote the graphic novels The Awakened and The Rejects, wrote The Quick and Dirty Guides to... series of non fiction writing guides and short fiction, and edited anthologies including Jewish Noir II from PM Press. She was creative consultant on the Mad Cave Studios Dick Tracy series from 2024 and became the first woman in the strip's near century of history to receive sole writing credit for a Dick Tracy story. She also taught in the MFA programme in writing and publishing at Long Island University Brooklyn.

Osman served on the Race Equity and Social Justice Committee of the Pongo Poetry Project, which uses poetry writing to help young people who have experienced trauma, and on the board of Prototype Health, a nonprofit providing primary health care to uninsured and underinsured people. She shared her home with her Boston Terriers, Tamerlane and Henry, and a polydactyl cat, Lafitte.

Osman spent her career widening who gets published in crime, horror and comics, both as an editor who sought out writers from outside the mainstream and as a writer who broke new ground on Dick Tracy. Her last work, the Dick Tracy Veterans Day Special, was released in the week after her death was announced.