ABOUT THE AUTHORS

KELLEY ARMSTRONG is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Otherworld series, as well as the New York Times bestselling young adult trilogy Darkest Powers, the Darkness Rising trilogy, and the Nadia Stafford series. Her latest series, the Rockton novels, are mysteries. She lives in rural Ontario, Canada, with her husband and three children.

DALE BAILEY is the author of eight books, including In the Night Wood, The End of the End of Everything, and The Subterranean Season. His story “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime’s Masters of Horror television series. His short fiction has been frequently reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies. Bailey has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

ELIZABETH BEAR is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of dozens of novels; over a hundred short stories; and a number of essays, nonfiction, and opinion pieces for markets as diverse as Popular Mechanics and the Washington Post. Her most recent novels are The Origin of Storms (Lotus Kingdoms 3) and Machine (White Space 2). She lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with her spouse, writer Scott Lynch.

ZEN CHO is the author of the Sorcerer to the Crown novels, Black Water Sister; The Order of the Pure Moon, a novella; and various works of shorter fiction some of which are collected in Spirits Abroad. Her most recent novel is contemporary fantasy Black Water Sister. She is a Hugo, Crawford, and British Fantasy Award winner as well as a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia and resides in the UK.

WENMIMAREBA KLOBAH COLLINS is a Black queer writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Literature and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and Critical visual Studies. Her work is in The Dark, Samovar, and in Akashic Books’ Duppy Thursday series of Caribbean stories.

ELAINE CUYEGKENG is a Chinese-Filipino writer. She grew up in Manila, where there are many, many creaky old houses with ghosts inside them. She writes about eldritch creatures, monsters with human faces and the old, old story of art and revolution. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner. Cuyegkeng’s work has been published in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, The Dark, and Rocket Kapre.

BRIAN EVENSON is the author of scores of works of short fiction and many books of fiction, most recently the story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. His novel Windeye and collection Immobility were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel. Evenson’s novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

JAMES EVERINGTON‘s most recent collection is Trying To Be So Quiet & Other Hauntings and he has co-edited (with Dan Howarth) three anthologies, the most recent of which is Pareidolia. He has also authored the novel Paupers Graves as well as more than thirty works of shorter fiction. He lives in Nottingham, England, and, if you are buying drinks, he’ll take a Guinness.

CRAIG LAURANCE GIDNEY is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me and Skin Deep Magic; the novels Bereft and A Spectral Hue; and numerous short stories. Both his collections and A Spectral Hue were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award and Bereft won both the Bronze Moonbeam and Silver IPPY Awards. In 2020, A Spectral Hue was a Carl Brandon Parallax Award Honoree. Hairsbreadth, a fairy tale novel, is serialized on Broken Eye Books. Gidney is a lifelong resident of Washington, DC.

THOMAS HA is a former attorney turned stay-at-home father who enjoys writing speculative fiction during the rare moments when both of his children happen to be asleep at the same time. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

ELIZABETH HAND is the bestselling author of fourteen genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. Her sixth collection, The Best of Elizabeth Hand, was published earlier this year. She lives in a small town on the coast of Maine and sometimes in Camden Town, London.

ALIX E. HARROW is an ex-historian with lots of opinions and excessive library fines, currently living in Kentucky with her husband and their semi-feral children. She won a Hugo for her short fiction and debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her second novel, The Once and Future Witches, was named as one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR Books.

MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is the New York Times-bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation. The Mere Wife, a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, was named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction. Headley’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the New York Times-bestselling author of twenty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, and been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels. His most recent novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw, was released earlier this year. Jones lives in Boulder, Colorado.

SHINGAI NJERI KAGUNDA is an Afrofuturist freedom dreamer, Swahili sea lover, and femme storyteller hailing from Nairobi, Kenya. She is currently pursuing a Literary Arts MFA at Brown University. kagunda work hs been longlisted for the Nommo Award and shortlisted for the Fractured Lit Prize. Her work has also been published in Fantasy and Khōréō magazines. She is also the co-founder of Voodoonauts: an Afrofuturist workshop for black writers.

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of fifteen science fiction and dark fantasy novels, many comic books, and more than two hundred published short stories, novellas, and vignettes. They are also the author of scientific papers in the field of paleontology and is a research associate and fossil preparator at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Kiernan’s most recent novel is Tindalos Effect; Comes a Pale Rider is their seventeenth collection. They are a four-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and have been honored with the World Fantasy Award twice. Kiernan is also the recipient of the Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Locus Award.

SOLEIL KNOWLES is a Bahamian writer currently working on her BA in English and Creative Writing. In her free time, she can be found eating plantain chips and watching reruns of Avatar: The Last Airbender. She lives with her plants and books.

NAOMI KRITZER is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and novels for adults, including the Eliana’s Song duology and the Dead Rivers trilogy. Her short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award, Locus Award, and was a finalist for the Nebula. Her first YA novel, Catfishing on CatNet won the Minnesota Book Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Its sequel, Chaos on Catnet, was published earlier this year. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and cats. She also writes about politics (mainly elections) in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

VICTOR LAVALLE is the author of the short story collection Slap-boxing with Jesus, four novels (The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling), and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book: Victor LaValle’s Destroyer. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. Raised in Queens, New York, LaValle now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and children. He teaches at Columbia University.

V. H. LESLIE is the author of a short story collection, Skein and Bone, and novel Bodies of Water. Her short stories have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies. Leslie has been nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards and she won the Lightship International Prize. She has been awarded fellowships for her writing at Hawthornden in Scotland and the Saari Institute in Finland, and her non-fiction has appeared in History Today, The Victorianist and Gramarye.

H. PUEYO is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of speculative fiction and comics. Her work has appeared before in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fireside, and The Dark, among others

DANNY RHODES is the author of three contemporary novels, Asboville, Soldier Boy, and most recently FAN. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The Horror Library, Black Static, Cemetery Dance, and Best New Horror. His essay on the ghost stories of L. T. C. Rolt appears in Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern. He is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, MARY RICKERT worked as a kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She is the winner of the Locus Award, Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. Her novel, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie was published earlier this year. Her novella Lucky Girl, How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story will be published in the fall of 2022.

SONYA TAAFFE reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in the Lambda-nominated Forget the Sleepless Shores and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, A Mayse-Bikhl, and Ghost Signs. She lives with one of her husbands and both of her cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper belt object.

STEVE RASNIC TEM, a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards, has published 470+ short stories. Figures Unseen gathers some of his best. Other collections include The Night Doctor & Other Tales, The Harvest Child and Other Fantasies, and the forthcoming Thanatrauma. His novel Ubo is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins. Yours to Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing, written with his late wife Melanie, is now available. A transplanted Southerner from Lee County Virginia, Tem is a long-time resident of Colorado.

SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science, and Mississippi Delta conjure. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future is her first all prose collection. She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections and edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction Dark Matter anthologies. She is the associate editor of the historic Black arts literary journal Obsidian: Literature & the Arts in the African Diaspora and editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Thomas also writes for Marvel. She lives in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times- and USA Today-bestselling author of over forty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including the Fairyland series, Space Opera, Deathless, and The Orphan’s Tales. Her most recent novels are The Past is Red and Comfort Me with Apples. She is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Otherwise, Lambda, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, among others. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, son, and extremely judgmental cat.

A. C. WISE’s work has appeared in publications such as Uncanny, Tor.com, Shimmer, and Clarkesworld. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and she has twice been a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She has published two collections and a novella. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling, and a new short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, were published earlier this year. In addition to her fiction, she contributes review columns to The Book Smugglers and Apex.

JOHN WISWELL is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His work has appeared in venues including Uncanny, Nightmare, Nature Futures, Diabolical Plots, Fireside, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Pseudopod, Cast of Wonders, and PodCastle. He is a Locus Award Finalist and Nebula Award Finalist. He wishes every family a home that loves them.