ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kristen Bonn lives in Keizer, Oregon, with her two preteen boys, two teenage girls, eight ever-present cats, and one incredibly supportive and creative husband. She attempts to divide her time fairly between her family and her two jobs, one as an elementary school library assistant and the other as the executive director of the local youth symphony, neither of which relate much to her degree in interior design. She fills her spare time as a voracious reader, a decent quilter, and a developing handbell player. Trapped indoors during Oregon’s dreary, wet winters and pollen-filled springs, writing became a perfect outlet for Kristen to transport herself to other worlds filled with blue skies and abundant tissues. “A Small Sacrifice” is her first published story.

 

Though born and raised on an Ontario tobacco farm, Brad Carson has spent most of his time in cities working in theater, where he learned the craft of writing dialogue and the value of strong coffee. Currently he can be seen—or not seen as that is the nature of the job—as a background performer in movies and television. He has planted trees, managed bookstores, painted buildings, wheel-barrowed gravel for swimming pools, and served as a security guard. These days he lives in Toronto with his life mate, Arlene Stinchcombe, and a wayfaring cat named Mooch. The former is his collaborator on a high fantasy series called Knights of the Pentacle, and the latter just likes to be scratched behind the ears. “Here There Be Monsters” is his first professional sale in the fantasy genre.

 

Jennifer Crow began studying Russian in high school, and quickly fell in love with the history and culture of that country. When she visited what was then the Soviet Union as a student ambassador, Saint Petersburg was her favorite stop on the tour, so it was only a matter of time before the city made an appearance in one of her stories. Jennifer’s work has appeared in a number of print and electronic venues, and several of her poems have received honorable mentions in past editions of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. She lives beside a waterfall near Buffalo, New York.

 

Linda A. B. Davis was originally schooled in journalism but has decided that writing science fiction and fantasy is a lot more fun. She enjoys creating worlds and characters that she would like to see become real. Her work has appeared in various Web and print magazines as well as local newspapers. Her other anthology story, “Winds of Change,” appeared in Something Magic This Way Comes, edited by Sarah A. Hoyt. Linda lives in northwestern Florida with her husband, Steve, and their teenage daughter, Erica. They are all graciously tolerated by three dogs, a cat, and a rabbit. The rabbit rules.

 

Urania Fung, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, was born in Kansas and raised in Texas. Her father’s love of Asian myths and fantasies made it easy for her to spend her childhood immersed in videos and books of the genre. Inspired by the author Jin Yong, she began writing stories in eighth grade. She has been a finalist in the San Gabriel Writers’ League’s Writing Smarter contest and the Writers’ League of Texas Novel Manuscript Competition. She is co-editor of Mascot Mania: Spirit of Texas High Schools. She has an M.A. in English, and she has taught English in China and in Texas.

Although K. J. Gould has had several nonfiction articles and essays published, she has always considered writing fiction to be a private pleasure. Doing it in public makes her nervous. On the other hand, getting paid for writing fiction revives dreams of authorhood that she has nurtured since she discovered that actual people got paid actual money for writing the stories and books she so loved to read. While she awaits the Famous Author Fairy’s tap of the wand, she lives in southeastern Michigan with her husband, an ever-changing number of four-footed “kids,” and a large backyard, where she indulges her inner child’s need to play in the dirt.

 

Costi Gurgu is a Romanian writer born in the city of Constanta on the Black Sea. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife, Vali. He is a graphic designer and an illustrator and has been the art director of Playboy magazine, Madame Figaro magazine, and Tabu magazine. His more than forty stories have appeared in different Romanian magazines and anthologies and have won numerous awards. He has a story collection, a novel, and has edited three KULT anthologies. “Angels and Moths” is his first North American sale. He had a turtle, Cleo, which apparently suffered from seasickness and flysickness and couldn’t cross the ocean to its new home. He is sure Cleo will roam the Carpathians for many centuries.

 

Over the past 25 years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold many novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread That Binds the Bones, won a Stoker Award. Spirits That Walk in Shadow, a young adult novel, came out in 2006, and her novel Fall of Light will be published in 2009. Nina does production for F&SF, teaches short story writing, and works with teen writers. She lives in Oregon.

 

Liz Holliday is a British writer who lives in London with the obligatory cat. The equally obligatory list of past occupations includes theater director, bookshop owner, senior playleader, and teacher. She’s now given up all that to write full time. Her original fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines in the U.K., U.S., Europe, and on the net. One of them was short-listed for the Crime Writers’ Association (UK) short story dagger and later adapted for the U.S. TV show “The Hunger.” She has also written ten TV novelizations, piles of sf/f-related journalism, educational material, Web content, and games—which is what you end up with when you have a grasshopper brain.

 

Natalie Walker Millman is a former English literature and history teacher who now enjoys the perils and benefits of working in her home office. She has traveled extensively, and is a long-time student of martial arts. Raised on a diet of myths and legends, she’s been an avid devourer of science fiction and fantasy since she learned to read. She lives with her family in Toranto.

 

Jana Paniccia lives in Toronto, although she tries to get out of the city as much as possible, preferably to visit more places she’s never been before. Thanks to Ages of Wonder, she already has her eyes set on the next horizon: sailing on a tall ship. One day! Her short stories have appeared in a number of antholgoies, morst recently Children of Magic and Fantasy Gone Wrong. She also co-edited the DAW anthology Under Cover of Darkness with Julie E. Czerneda, released in 2007.

 

Tony Pi is something of a sphinx himself. Is he an award-winning writer or a well-traveled linguist? A winner of the Writers of the Future Contest in 2006, Tony’s poetry and fiction have seen print in On Spec, Abyss & Apex, Tales of the Unanticipated, and elsewhere. He enjoys fantasy with a twist of mystery, served on a bed of history. From the Louvre to the Royal Ontario Museum in hometown Toronto, museums have been his constant muse. Then again, when you least expect it, Doctor Pi descends upon a Canadian university and challenges students with fiendish riddles in linguistics. Or he may quiz you on the words you use and how you pronounce them, to uncover the secret of how dialects change over time and spread over geography. One or the other, both or more? Tony simply smiles like Schrödinger’s Sphinx, basking in the paradox.

 

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough grew up hearing tales from the Wild West told by her Grandpa Scarborough, a former working cowboy, and his brother, her Great Uncle Hap, who learned to use a bullwhip and later, while working as a carpenter for MGM, imparted this knowledge to actress Maureen O’Hara who needed to use the whip for a role in a western. Scarborough became better acquainted with tales of leprechauns and Irish history both in Ireland and America while visiting Anne McCaffrey at her home in County Wicklow. At last count she’s written 36 novels, 22 solo and 14 with Anne McCaffrey, including the 1989 Nebula winner Healer’s War. Some of the many short stories she’s written were collected in an anthology called Scarborough Fair. When she’s not writing she’s designing and making jewelry and doing the bidding of her co-resident felines. For more information on any of the above, visit her website www.eascarborough.com.

 

Karina Sumner-Smith is a Toronto-based author, Nebula Award nominee, and Clarion graduate. Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies, including Children of Magic and Mythspring, and magazines such as Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Fantasy. Karina also works in Canada’s oldest science fiction bookstore and co-owns a small jewelry design company.

 

Caitlin Sweet has been an ESL instructor, a trombone teacher, an administrative assistant, and a doula. Her first novel, A Telling of Stars, was published by Penguin Canada in 2003. It was nominated for an Aurora Award, a Crawford Award, a Locus Best First Novel Award, and long-listed for the Sunburst Award. Her second novel, The Silences of Home, was published in 2005 and nominated for an Aurora Award. The editors of SFSite placed it at number four in their Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2005 list. She has been working on her third novel for far too long. Caitlin lives in Toronto with her family.

 

Sandra Tayler spends the majority of her days juggling meals, dishes, transportation, and laundry for the four children she shares with her pet cartoonist (and husband) Howard. She manages his business in the slices of time she finds sandwiched among the kids’ sandwiches, yet still finds gaps large enough to accommodate a compulsion to write. Her writings include essays, a blog, short stories, and her husband’s paychecks. Tens of thousands of schlockmercenary.com readers would be amused to see her hand the cartoonist a check which she wrote, he endorses, and then she cashes (and spends). “Immigrant” is Sandra’s first published story. It is enthusiastically and vaingloriously beating its chest in front of the rest of her work, which can be found at sandra.tayler.com.

 

Queenie Tirone is her real name. Honestly. And no, her mother was not a hippie, though she wishes that were true. She feels ripped off she doesn’t live in a castle. She’s a young Canadian writer who loves fiction in all its forms, but her main interest lies in fantasy and horror. Some of Queenie’s hobbies include spoken word, video games, and working part time as assistant editor of Burning Effigy Press. Dreams and nightmares are her passions.

 

Born a Malaysian with a hint of Dutch bloodline, Ika Vanderkoeck’s passion for writing began when she was twelve after an accidental encounter with a fantasy novel left her mind reeling with ideas. A prank call to a local production house got her into the media industry when she was very young, where she worked as a host for a children’s program. She became a scriptwriter when she was seventeen, before continuing her studies at a local university. Ika currently works in a local media conglomerate and is in the process of finishing her first fantasy novel. She also loves listening to Celtic and pirate shanties when writing, a hobby which has developed into an interest in the medieval era, the Celtic culture, and the golden age of piracy.

 

Ceri Young’s work has appeared previously in On Spec magazine. She originally hails from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she can trace her family roots all the way back to the first German settlers at Lunenburg in 1753. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Mount St. Vincent University (Halifax), and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College (also, Halifax); in both places she learned how to ask the right questions, and write down the answers. Her love of history, mythology, and folk belief is self-taught. She enjoys finding new and obscure mythologies and combining them to create new stories. Ceri currently lives with her husband in Montreal, Quebec, where she works as a writer and editor.