About the Author
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Nina Allan has been the recipient of the British Science Fiction Award, the Liverpool John Moores Novella Award, and the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2014 and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her debut novel The Race was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle. She lives and works in North Devon, England.
Monica Byrne is a writer, playwright, and traveler based in Durham, NC. Her first novel, The Girl in the Road, won the Tiptree Award in 2015.
Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions Online, and Interzone. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013.
Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: she has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award and six British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of A Fire Born of Exile, a sapphic Count of Monte Cristo in space (Gollancz/JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., 2023), and of Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances (JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc, 2022 BSFA Award winner), a fantasy of manners and murders set in an alternate 19th Century Vietnamese court. She lives in Paris.
Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer from Kolkata, India. His debut novel The Devourers (Penguin Books India) was nominated for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in India, and released in North America from Ballantine Del Rey. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is a 2012 Octavia E. Butler Scholar, and a grateful graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Alix E. Harrow is the Hugo Award winning author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction. Her Fractured Fables series, beginning with the novella A Spindle Splintered, has been praised for its refreshing twist on familiar fairy tales. A former academic and adjunct, Harrow lives in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids.
N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has won the Hugo Award for best novel (The Fifth Season); been shortlisted for the Crawford, Gemmell Morningstar, and Tiptree Awards; and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She also won a Locus Award for Best First Novel (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) as well as multiple Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards.
Jemisin's short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, and Baen’s Universe; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss & Apex; and podcast markets and print anthologies. Her first six novels, a novella, and a short story collection are available from Orbit Books.
Jemisin is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she is a counseling psychologist and educator (specializing in career counseling and student development), a sometime hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger.
N. K.'s stories include The City Born Great and The Fifth Season.
MARGARET KILLJOY is an author and anarchist with a long history of itinerancy who currently calls Appalachia home. When she’s not writing, she can be found organizing to end hierarchy, crafting, or complaining about being old despite not being old at all. She is the author of several novels and the Danielle Cain series for Tor.com Publishing.
CIXIN LIU is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is a winner of the Hugo Award, an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as an engineer in a power plant. His novels include The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End.
Melissa Marr writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into 28 languages and been bestsellers in the US (NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal) as well as overseas. Wicked Lovely, her debut novel, was an instant New York Times bestseller and evolved into an internationally bestselling multi-book series with a myriad of accolades. Remedial Magic is the first of two books in a witchy lesbian fantasy-romance series. If she's not writing, you can find her in a kayak or on a trail with her wife.
David Nickle is the author of the novels The 'Geisters, Rasputin's Bastards, and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and co-author of The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder. His stories are collected in Knife Fight and Other Struggles, and Monstrous Affections. He is co-editor with Madeline Ashby of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a journalist covering municipal politics.
Laurie Penny is an author, journalist and screenwriter from London. They are a culture writer for Wired magazine and have written for the Guardian, New Statesman, New York Times, Longreads, Time Magazine and many more. They are a graduate of the Nieman Foundation Fellows' programme at Harvard University and the Clarion West Writer's Workshop. Sexual Revolution is their ninth book.
DANIEL POLANSKY was born in 1984 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of the Low Town series, the Hugo nominated The Builders, and A City Dreaming. He currently resides on a hill in eastern Los Angeles.
Lettie Prell’s short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Best of Apex Magazine anthology, Paranormal Underground, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, StarShipSofa podcast, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the novel Dragon Ring.
Delia Sherman is a highly acclaimed fantasy writer. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (a Mythopoeic Award winner), and Changeling. She lives in Boston and New York.
Specialising in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), among others. She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, holds an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow.
Caighlan Smith writes all kinds of fantasy and is the author of the Surreality series. Her first published novel Hallow Hour was written when she was seventeen. An award-winning writer, Caighlan is studying English, Classics and Creative Writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has written a dozen novels. The ‘C’ in her name is hard and the ‘gh’ is silent.
Lavie Tidhar's work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama and the forthcoming Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children's books such as Candy (2018) and the forthcoming A Child's Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.
Rajnar Vajra is an American Science Fiction and Fantasy writer with a wide range of interests and education stretching from astrophysics to Zen. He has been a lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter in a professional original rock band; a sound designer and recording engineer; a high school music teacher; a guitar instructor in the Performing Arts Division at the University of Massachusetts; a craftsperson designing and creating jewelry; and involved in doctorate-level biochemistry research. He has been a Hugo finalist and his work has appeared in several anthologies including Visions of Tomorrow and Into The New Millennium, also magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and especially Analog where his writing has been frequently featured, including a full novel serialization. Currently, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and divides his time between writing, performing, composing, and recording music, and providing private lessons for guitar, keyboard, bass, and voice students.
Gevevieve Valentine's first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards, and has appeared in several Best of the Year anthologies.
Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville series of novels about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and the post-apocalyptic murder mysteries Bannerless and The Wild Dead. She's written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.
Alyssa Wong is a Nebula-winning, Shirley Jackson-,Campbell-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid.
