About the Author
RUTHANNA EMRYS lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. Her stories have appeared in a number of venues, including Strange Horizons, Analog, and Tor.com. She is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, which began with Winter Tide. She makes home-made vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.
A prolific freelance author and journalist, Guy Haley is the author of Reality 36, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Valedorand Baneblade, among others. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.
CASSANDRA KHAW is the USA Today bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Library at Hellebore, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, The Salt Grows Heavy, Breakable Things, and coauthor of The Dead Take the A Train with Richard Kadrey. They are an award-winning game writer.
SEANAN McGUIRE is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Locus Award–winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. In 2022 she managed the same feat, again!
Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling writer of mostly science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. Her debut novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Nnedi has since won World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, Eisner, Hugo, Lodestar, and Nommo Awards, amongst others, for her work. Nnedi has also written comics for Marvel, including Black Panther: Long Live the King and the Shuri series. She holds a PhD in literature, master’s degrees in journalism and literature, and lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her daughter, Anyaugo.
Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. She is the Executive Director of Global Voices, a community of writers, editors, and translators providing community journalism from all over the world and advocating for indigenous and minority languages, media literacy, digital rights, and online freedom of expression. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named among the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, the Washington Post, and Book Riot; with sequels, it was a finalist for a Hugo award. The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on Jupiter, was on four best of 2023 lists and was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Ignyte awards for Best Novella. The sequel, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, was named one of the best science-fiction books of 2024 by Esquire, and the third book in the series, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, comes out in June 2025. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where she teaches on predictive fictions. She is co-editor of We Will Rise Again, an anthology of speculative fiction about social justice movements, coming out in December 2025.
Melissa F. Olson is the author of the Scarlett Bernard series of urban fantasy novels for Amazon's 47North and the mystery The Big Keep.
She lives in Madison, WI, with her family and two comically oversized dogs.
Victor LaValle is the author of more than ten works of fiction and graphic novels, including the multi-award-winning novel, The Changeling. His books have won the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Dragon Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award, among many others. He has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Writers Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives with his wife and kids in the Bronx.
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.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British science-fiction and fantasy writer known for a wide-variety of work including the Children of Time, Final Architecture, Dogs of War, Tyrant Philosophers and Shadows of the Apt series, as well as standalone books such as Elder Race, Doors of Eden, Spiderlight and many others. Children of Time and its series has won the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards, and his other works have won the British Fantasy, British Science Fiction and Sidewise Awards.