About the Contributors

Steve Berman is the author of short stories for teens, many of which are queer and can be found in the collection Red Caps: New Fairy Tales for Out of the Ordinary Readers. He is also the author of the young adult novel Vintage: A Ghost Story. Berman resides in Western Massachusetts and works at Deerfield Academy, one of the foremost private boarding schools in the United States.

Holly Black is the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of over thirty fantasy novels for children and young adults. She has been a finalist for the Eisner Award and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and a recipient of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, a Newbery Medal, and the Nebula Award. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages worldwide and adapted for film. Black currently lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret library.

Emma Bull writes science fiction and fantasy of various flavors and lengths. She likes digging holes in the dirt and putting plants in them, making clothes out of string and two sticks, dressing up for Halloween, and bicycling. Oh, and writing. She likes that too. Bull frequently teaches creative writing at Hamline University. At the moment, she is working on Claim, a sequel to her novel Territory, and planning further nefarious acts of literature.

Bill Congreve is an award-winning writer, editor, critic, and independent publisher with MirrorDanse Books. His work has been featured in several international publications such as Terror Australis, Aurealis, Borderlands, Monstres!, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, Cthulhu Deep Down Under, The Best of the Scream Factory, and War of the Worlds: Battleground Australia, and his vampire stories are collected in Epiphanies of Blood: Tales of Desperation and Thirst. His most recent collection is Souls Along the Meridian. Congreve won the Peter McNamara Achievement Award in 2012, and has acted as judge for the Aurealis Awards on nine occasions. He works as a policy and procedure writer in the emergency services sector.

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as the fiction editor of Omni Magazine, as well as an editor of Event Horizon magazine and Sci Fiction. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited about one hundred science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual Best Horror of the Year series, and most recently Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Mad Hatters and March Hares, The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea, and Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories.

Datlow has won multiple awards for her editing work. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award at the British Fantasy Convention for outstanding contribution to the genre. She was also honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association, as well as the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

Datlow currently lives in New York and cohosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, Datlow’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @EllenDatlow. She is owned by two cats.

A. M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Their fourth, A Daughter of No Nation, won the 2016 Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel. They have published over forty short stories on Tor.com and elsewhere. Dellamonica teaches writing at two universities—the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program and the University of Toronto Scarborough—and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Their sixth novel, Gamechanger, was released in September under the name L. X. Beckett and is a “hopetopia”, a story that imagines humanity surviving climate change and creating a post-carbon economy.

Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who calls Ottawa, Canada, home. The author of more than seventy adult, young adult, and children’s books, he has won World Fantasy, Aurora, Sunburst, and White Pine Awards, among others. Modern Library’s Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll, voted on by readers, included eight of de Lint’s books. De Lint is also a poet, artist, songwriter, performer, and folklorist. He writes a monthly book-review column for Fantasy & Science Fiction. For more information, visit his website at www.charlesdelint.com.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell.

Gregory Frost’s most recent work is the Shadowbridge duology from DelRey. It was an American Library Association Best Fantasy Novel pick. His novel Fitcher’s Brides was a World Fantasy Award finalist and a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award. His collaborative novelette with Michael Swanwick, “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters, H’ard and Andy Are Come to Town,” won an Asimov’s Readers’ Award. His short stories have been finalists for Bram Stoker, Nebula, Hugo, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards.

Nan Fry was an associate professor in the Academic Studies Department at Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Washington, DC. She was the author of several collections of poetry, including Say What I Am Called, a selection of riddles translated from Anglo-Saxon, and Relearning the Dark. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast and Opening a Door: Reading Poetry in the Middle School Classroom. Fry died in 2016.

Neil Gaiman is the New York Times–bestselling, Newbery Medal–winning author of The Graveyard Book. Several of his books, including Coraline, have been adapted into major motion pictures. American Gods has been made into a television miniseries by Starz. Gaiman is also famous for writing the Sandman graphic novel series, as well as numerous other books and comics for adult, young adult, and middle-grade readers. He has won Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards, among others. He is also the author of many short stories and poems. For more information, visit www.neilgaiman.com.

Bruce Glassco has appeared in four Datlow/Windling anthologies, and has had another half-dozen stories published in magazines. He is most well-known for his board games, especially the bestselling Betrayal at House on the Hill, along with Mystery! Motive for Murder and Fantasy Realms.  He is currently designing more games and writing a book that combines grammar instruction, novel writing, and roleplaying. Glassco has a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature and teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville. For more information, visit www bruceglassco.net.

Hiromi Goto is an emigrant from Japan who gratefully resides on the unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. She has written four books for adults and three books for children and young adults, and has won numerous prizes including the (formerly) James Tiptree Memorial Award, a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Shadow Life, her first graphic novel with artist Ann Xu, is pending with First Second Books. Hiromi is currently at work trying to decolonize her relationship to the land and to her writing.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and young adult novels, as well as more than three hundred short stories, over the past thirty years. Her works have been finalists for many major awards, and she has won both a Bram Stoker Award and a Nebula Award. Hoffman’s novels have been published by Avon, Atheneum, Ace, Pocket, Scholastic, Tachyon, and Viking. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. For a complete list of publications featuring Hoffman’s work, visit ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html. Hoffman also does production work for Fantasy & Science Fiction, and teaches writing. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Tanith Lee wrote nearly one hundred books and over 290 short stories, as well as radio plays and television scripts. Her genre-crossing includes fantasy, science fiction, horror, young adult, historical, detective, and contemporary fiction, plus combinations of them all. Some of her publications include the Lionwolf series—Cast a Bright Shadow, Here in Cold Hell, and No Flame But MinePiratica novels for young adults. The most recent collection of her short fiction, Love in a Time of Dragons and Other Rare Tales, was published in 2019 by Immanion Press. In 2009, Lee was named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention. She died in 2015.

Kelly Link is the author of four short story collections, including Get in Trouble, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She cofounded Small Beer Press with Gavin J. Grant, and continues to edit its zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Together, Grant and Link edited the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for several years, as well as the anthologies Monstrous Affections and Steampunk! Link lives with her family in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Gregory Maguire is the author of several novels for adults, including Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Lost. He has written more than a dozen novels for children, among them the popular Hamlet Chronicles series. His most recent novels are Egg & Spoon and Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker. A resident of Massachusetts, Maguire teaches creative writing, and lectures as a critic of children’s literature across the nation.

Patricia A. McKillip is primarily known for her fantasy novels, and has published books for both adults and young adults. Among her most well-known young adult novels are The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddle-Master Trilogy. Her many fantasy novels for adults include Ombria in Shadow, Winter Rose, and The Bell at Sealey Head. She has won both a World Fantasy Award and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Her latest collection of short stories is entitled Dreams of Distant Shores, and her latest fantasy novel is Kingfisher. McKillip lives in Oregon with her husband, poet David Lunde.

Delia Sherman writes stories and novels for younger readers and adults. Her most recent short stories have appeared in Mechanical Animals: Tales at the Crux of Creatures and Tech and Mad Hatters and March Hares. Sherman’s collection of short stories, Young Woman in a Garden, was published by Small Beer Press. She has written three novels for adults: Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and The Fall of the Kings (cowritten with Ellen Kushner). Her novels for younger readers include Changeling, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, and The Evil Wizard Smallbone.  Her novel The Freedom Maze received Andre Norton, Mythopoeic Fantasy, and Prometheus Awards. When she’s not writing, Sherman spends her time teaching, editing, knitting, cooking, and traveling. Though her favorite place to be is on the road, she calls a rambling apartment in New York City home, with her spouse Ellen Kushner, and far too many pieces of paper.

When Ellen Steiber was eight, her aunt Dolly gave her The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, translated from its original French by Marie Ponsot and illustrated by Adrienne Ségur. It cast a spell on Steiber that has never been broken. She has been in love with fairy tales, myths, and folklore ever since. To date, she has published over thirty-five books for children and young adults, most of them drawing on myth and the supernatural. Her short fiction has appeared in various books in the Datlow/Windling adult fairy tale series, as well as in The Essential Bordertown, edited by Terri Windling and Delia Sherman. Steiber has won two Golden Kite Awards, and her young adult story “The Shape of Things” was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her adult fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, based on the lore of gemstones, was published by Tor Books. For more information, visit her website at www.ellensteiber.com.

Katherine Vaz, a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard and Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a National Endowment for the Arts recipient, has published two novels, Saudade and Mariana, the latter of which was translated into six languages and selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998. Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. The Love Life of an Assistant Animator & Other Stories was published by Tailwinds Press in 2017. Vaz has published many short stories, including some in anthologies for children. She lives in New York City with her husband, composer, writer, and television producer Christopher Cerf.

Terri Windling is a writer, editor, painter, folklorist, and lifelong wanderer of forests both mythic and real. She has worked as a fiction editor in New York City, directed a mythic arts organization in Boston, and cofounded an arts retreat in the Arizona desert; and now writes and paints at the Bumblehill Studio in a small English village in Dartmoor.

Windling has published over thirty previous anthologies (many of them coedited with Ellen Datlow), as well as fiction for adults and children, and nonfiction on folklore and myth. She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and a Bram Stoker Award; and has been placed on the short lists for a Tiptree Award and a Shirley Jackson Award. In 2010, she received the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Solstice Award for outstanding contributions to the speculative fiction field as a writer, editor, artist, educator, and mentor. Visit her folklore and fantasy blog, Myth & Moor, at www.terriwindling.com.