Some of the Best of Tor.com 2021

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 lives in Brisbane, Australia, a subtropical city.

Her Australian Gothic debut, Flyaway, (set in Western Queensland, where she grew up) received a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J. Bounds Award) and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. She is also the author of a short story collection, Kindling, and a poetry collection, Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion. In addition, she is a World Fantasy Award–winning illustrator, has previously been a translator and a lawyer, and holds both an MPhil and PhD in creative writing (Australian Gothic literature and creative observation, respectively).

Cheri Kamei is a basement goblin and a floral print disaster. She resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Jasmin Kirkbride is an author and academic. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Reactor, and her story “Sand” was featured in Some of the Best from Tor.com 2021. Her eco-poetry has been published in places including Frogpond and Presence, and she was the 2022 Researcher-in-Residence for the British Haiku Society, investigating haiku in the climate crisis. An ex-editor and book trade journalist, Jasmin is now a Lecturer by day. She holds an MA in ancient history from King’s College London, and an MA in creative writing and PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA). Her thesis explored radical hope in dystopian climate fiction, and her academic research explores climate fiction, ecopoetry, and fungal literature. The Forest on the Edge of Time is her debut novel.

Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominated author and coder. His many works of short fiction have appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, Asimov's, Tor.com/Reactor, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other publications and anthologies, including multiple Year's Bests. He is the author of the short story collection Histories Within Us, the far-future adventure novel Space Trucker Jess, and the Mars-based novella The Rainseekers. Alongside Ellen Datlow, he runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan. And he is the creator of the Moksha submissions system, used by many of the largest fiction publishers today.

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 writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the USA Today bestselling author of the novella Automatic Noodle, the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and the novels The Terraformers (a Nebula Award finalist), The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the three-time Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

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 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 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.