Cara Ellison is a Scottish author and videogame designer, though she started out making radio at BBC Radio 4 and fell into the land of videogames by accident. She's critiqued most aspects of games in word form anywhere you'd expect to find them, from PC Gamer to The Guardian. A comfortable solo world adventurer, she wrote a book called Embed With Games about travelling the world asking questions about why people make games and what they are for. Permanently uncomfortable in one type of writing or design, she makes TV shows, comics, videogames, and essays, and has difficulty sitting still, frankly.
Maranda Elizabeth is a writer, zinester, identical twin, high school dropout, recovering alcoholic, and white non-binary amethyst-femme. They write about recovery with BPD, complex-trauma, and fibromyalgia; writing, creativity, and friendship; politicizing recovery; queer mad poor crip lineages; and surviving social assistance and poverty. Maranda's work explores themes of loneliness and disposability; synchronicity and meaning-making; and memory and making a home. They have published a zine anthology, Telegram: A Collection of 27 Issues (2012) and the novels Ragdoll House (2013) and We Are the Weirdos (2017). They read Tarot for misfits and outcasts, and publish a column on LittleRedTarot.com, ‘See the Cripple Dance’. Maranda grew up in Lindsay, Ontario, (Ojibway, Chippewa, and Anishinabek land), and currently resides in Toronto, Ontario (traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and the Métis). Read their work at marandaelizabeth.com.
Laura Mandanas is a Boston-based Filipina American writer with a keen interest in loose leaf tea, nicknaming her girlfriend's biceps, and destroying the patriarchy. Her background is in industrial engineering. You can read more of her work at Autostraddle and lauramandanas.com.
Catherine Hernandez is a Toronto-based writer and theatre practitioner. Her book, Scarborough (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017), was the winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Award, shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and longlisted for Canada Reads 2018. It made the ‘Best of 2017’ lists for The Globe and Mail, National Post, Quill and Quire, and CBC Books. Learn more at catherinehernandezcreates.com
Avery Edison is a comedian and humourist who has written and performed extensively about her experiences as a transgender woman. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, at McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and The Toast. She lives on Twitter, where she spends all day making terrible puns and talking too much about her genitals.
Gabriela Herstik is a fashion alchemist, witch, and author based in Los Angeles. Gabriela examines what it means to be a modern day witch in her Nylon Column ‘Ask a Witch’ and loves to dissect the intersection between glamour and magick, especially through style. Her debut book Craft: How to Be A Modern Witch will be released with Ebury Press/ Random House in March 2018. You can visit her website at gabrielaherstik.com and follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @gabyherstik.
Marguerite Bennett is a GLAAD-nominated, New York Times-bestselling comic book writer based in Los Angeles. Her superheroic credits include DC Comics' Batwoman and DC Bombshells, as well as stints on Batgirl and Lois Lane, and Marvel's A-Force, Years of Future Past, and Angela: Queen of Hel. Elsewhere, her credits include Josie and the Pussycats and Red Sonja. Her creator-owned titles, Animosity and Insexts, can be found through Aftershock Comics. Her prose has appeared in The Secret Loves of Geek Girls. Her work is full of queer characters, heroines, villainesses, talking animals, bloody revenge sagas, female monsters, murder, and kissing.
Sam Maggs is an Associate Writer of video games at BioWare, an occasional comics writer for IDW, and the bestselling author of Wonder Women and The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy, both from Quirk Books. An authority on women in pop culture, Sam has spoken or written on the topic for The New York Times, Vulture, NPR, Marie Claire, PC Gamer, The Guardian, and more. She is named after Bewitched's Samantha Stephens, but please don't ask her to do the nose thing. @SamMaggs / sammaggs.com
Deb Chachra, PhD, is a professor of engineering at a small college outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her research interests include biological materials, infrastructure, and engineering education, with an emphasis on gender and the student experience. In addition to her scientific publications, she has published essays in the comic book Bitch Planet, the scientific journal Nature, and many other outlets. Her professional goals include revolutionalising engineering education and overthrowing the patriarchy.
Mey Valdivia Rude is a bisexual Latina trans woman living in Los Angeles. She's the Trans Editor at Autostraddle, a writer, comic consultant, and a trans activist. She's a bruja, a femme, and a bratty bottom who loves comic books, witches, dinosaurs, and crying. She has a cat named Sawyer and a very successful Twitter.
Larissa Pham is a writer and anti-violence advocate in New York. Her work engages with themes of the self, intimacy, and narrative, often within the context of visual culture. She is the author of Fantasian, a novella from Badlands Unlimited, and her work has also appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. You can find her work at larissapham.com.
Meredith Yayanos is, among other things, an artist and a monstrous feminist agitator. She lives, works, and fights in California, New York, and incalculable liminal in-betweens.
merritt k is a writer and podcaster living in Brooklyn. She hosts the podcasts Woodland Secrets and dadfeelings, writes about body accidents and digital weirdness, and can be found on Twitter at @merrittk.
Sophie Saint Thomas is a queer writer based in Brooklyn, where she lives with two marmalade cats, Mama Cat and Major Tom Cat. Sophie grew up in the US Virgin Islands. She is a regular contributor to Vice, Cosmopolitan, Mic, Noisey, Broadly, Marie Claire, High Times, Nylon, Playboy, GQ, Refinery29, Harper's Bazaar, and more. Brooklyn Magazine included her on their annual 2016 30 Under 30 Envy List. She loves to drink tea and study the occult and believes vanity is a delicious sin.
Sim Bajwa (@simuella) is an bookseller and writer based in the West Midlands. She graduated from Edinburgh Napier with an MA in Creative Writing in 2016, and her work has been published in Helios Quarterly, the Dangerous Women Project, 404 Ink's Nasty Women, and Shoreline of Infinity. She's currently working on her first fantasy novel and her favourite things are nail polish, cats, and tea.
Kim Boekbinder is a Noise Witch, casting neon spells over shadowed rooms around the planet Earth; she also tells stories on paper and on film. Kim loves you, she'll fight for you, but if you come for her friends, she'll fight you.
Sara David is a writer who was born in the Philippines and raised in New York. She's currently an editor at Broadly and lives in Brooklyn with two cats, Jubilee and Enzo.
Katelan Foisy is a multimedia artist and writer. She has displayed at The Worcester Art Museum, Ohio History Museum, MODA, WEAM, and Last Rights. She has graced the pages of the Grammy Award programs and the stage of Cynthia von Buhler's ‘Speakeasy Dollhouse’ plays. Katelan has been featured in NY Times, Elle, Paper Magazine, GQ Italy, and Time Out NY. She has written for Motherboard/Vice and Electric Literature and held events with Atlas Obscura, OVADA, and The Project Room. Her illustrations are featured in the forthcoming Sibyls Oraculum (Destiny Books Spring, 2018) with Tayannah McQuillar and Chaos of the Third Mind (Fulgar Ltd, UK, 2018) with Vanessa Sinclair. She was called a ‘female Jack Kerouac’ by Taylor Mead.
J. A. Micheline, or JAM, is a writer, critic, and editor newly based in Chicago. She writes cultural criticism, prose, comics, and the occasional angry tweet before bedtime. Her still-in-progress novel, Super Charismatic Nucleus, was shortlisted for Cambridge University's Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2016 and her critical work has been featured in The Guardian, Vice, The A.V. Club, and elsewhere.
Nora Khan is a writer in New York City, where she is Acting Editor at Rhizome. Her criticism and fiction, focusing on digital visual culture and philosophy of technology, has appeared in 4Columns, Flash Art, Art in America, California Sunday, Conjunctions, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her book with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files, was published by Primary Information. Her writing and research have been supported by a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, an Eyebeam Research Residency, and an Iowa Arts Fellowship. Learn more at noranahidkhan.com.
Leigh Alexander is a writer and narrative designer (Reigns: Her Majesty, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Monitor). Her journalism (The Guardian, How We Get to Next, Medium, Motherboard) tackles offbeat futurism, digital society, immaterial labour, technomancy, and how the internet, politics, and pop culture intersect. She is the author of Breathing Machine, a memoir of early internet society, and her occasional ASMR video series ‘Lo-Fi Let's Play’ explores ancient computer adventures. More projects can be found at leighalexander.net.