About the Author
G. V. Anderson is a speculative fiction author whose short stories have won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, and been nominated for a Nebula Award. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed, as well as anthologies such as The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. She resides in Dorset, UK, and is currently writing her first novel.
’Pemi Aguda has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Granta, American Short Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story among others. She is from Lagos, Nigeria.
ELIZABETH BEAR was the recipient of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for her short fiction. Bear lives in South Hadley, MA.
www.elizabethbear.com @matociquala
Kate Elliott has been writing science fiction and fantasy for 30 years, after bursting onto the scene with Jaran. She is best known for her Crown of Stars epic fantasy series and the New York Times bestselling YA fantasy Court of Fives. Elliott's particular focus is immersive world-building & centering women in epic stories of adventure, amidst transformative cultural change. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes & spoils her Schnauzer.
A.T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award winning writer and mechanical engineer. She lives in Philadelphia where she's known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. Her work has been nominated for a Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Award, has been in multiple Year's Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications.
GLEN HIRSHBERG received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Best Fiction, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was a Literary Guild Featured Selection. His collection, The Two Sams, won three International Horror Guild Awards and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Hirshberg has won the Shirley Jackson Award and been a finalist for the World Fantasy and the Bram Stoker Awards.
Kathleen Jennings is a writer and illustrator based in Brisbane, Australia. Her Australian Gothic debut, Flyaway, was published by Tordotcom (Pan Macmillan, USA) and Picador (Australia) in 2020, and has been published in French (by les Moutons électriques) in 2023. Her short fiction has been published in Tor.com, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many other markets. Her debut poetry collection Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion was published by Brain Jar Press in 2020. Her writing has won the British Fantasy and Ditmar Awards, and been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and The Courier Mail People’s Choice Book of the Year Award (Queensland Literary Awards). She is also a World Fantasy Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated illustrator. Her short story collection Kindling is to be published by Small Beer Press in January 2024, and she is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Queensland.
Cheri Kamei is a basement goblin and a floral print disaster. She resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Jasmin Kirkbride is a writer and editor. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Open Pen and Fairlight Books, and she has published a handful of poems and peer-reviewed academic articles. She is currently working on a novel. By day, she is a PhD researcher and associate tutor at UEA, exploring hope and climate fiction. She has worked in publishing for several years and is a freelance editor and writing mentor alongside her studies. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and an MA in Ancient History from King’s College London.
Matthew Kressel is the author of King of Shards and Queen of Static, and is a World Fantasy Award finalist and multiple Nebula Award finalist. His short fiction has appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, Interzone, the anthologies Cyber World, Naked City, After, and many other markets. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. By day he codes websites, and by night he recites Blade Runner in its entirety from memory. He lives in New York City.
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani vagrant camped in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His work is forthcoming in the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Nightmare, and other venues. In December 2014, Usman led Pakistan's first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) was published by HarperCollins. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.
ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.
Noc Gu, Buddhist practitioner, writer, and seeker. Born in 1989 and raised in a suburban town in Shanghai, China, they have been attracted by SF&F novels since a young age and started writing in college.
Sarah Pinsker is the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Award winning author of A Song For A New Day, We Are Satellites, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, Lost Places, and over sixty works of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, and in numerous anthologies and year’s bests. She is also a singer/songwriter with four albums on various independent labels. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and two weird dogs.
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.
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, and New York. Her first novel, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today Show and NPR On Point. She is also a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 fellow, and a recipient of a 2016 Elizabeth George Foundation’s emerging writers grant.
Cooper Shrivastava is a writer based in New York City. She holds an undergraduate degree in math and philosophy, and is always excited when she can bring these elements into her fiction. When not reading and writing, she can often be found indulging in her other strange hobby: recreating recipes from historical sources. Cooper was a member of the 2019 Clarion Writers Workshop and has been published in Clarkesworld, and Heavy Feather Review.
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.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as the Prix Imaginales. Valente has also been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
Find out more on her website and on Twitter!
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.
E. Lily Yu is the author of On Fragile Waves, which won the 2022 Washington Book Award for Fiction, and Jewel Box, forthcoming in October 2023. Over thirty of her short stories have appeared in venues from McSweeney's to Tor.com.
