Exanastasis
JINGXUAN HU
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Brad started dreaming of being a professional fiction writer while doing unpaid work on a local community radio science fiction serial called Searcher & Stallion. It was while working on Searcher & Stallion that Brad also met the woman who would become his biggest fan—and his wife—and together they moved to the Puget Sound of Washington State in 1993.
For the next fourteen years, Brad toiled at various occupations ranging from front desk clerk at a motel to computer support at a well-known Seattle hospital—including enlistment in the US Army Reserve in the wake of September 11, 2001. Along the way Brad nursed his writing habit, accruing a significant pile of rejection slips, such that he stopped doing short fiction altogether in 1999 and made several abortive attempts at novels before, in 2005, he almost quit in frustration.
Brad’s wife, Annie, wouldn’t let him give up on his dream, however, so he began attending local writing workshops and conventions such as Norwescon, in an attempt to revive his production.
He has since moved back to Utah, still doing computer work in healthcare and enjoying his promotion to warrant officer in the US Army Reserve. He’s plugging into the local SF & F writing community and attending conventions such as Life, The Universe & Everything and CONduit.
In 2007 Brad started submitting his stories to Writers of the Future, garnering four Honorable Mentions and a Finalist placement before ultimately winning Third Place for the third quarter of this volume—his first professional success. Shortly thereafter Brad sold his Finalist story to Analog Science Fiction Magazine, and currently has numerous pieces of short fiction and two novels winging through the markets.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Jingxuan was born in China but lived in Singapore for the last ten years before coming to Chicago. For the past few years, Jingxuan has been drawing comics and illustrations. She has been exploring different storytelling techniques in comics by extensively practicing and reading many genres of comics, including both Japanese manga and American graphic novels.
The year of 2008 was a turning point for her as some of her works began to be published. Her debut manga Lament was published in July 2009 by Chuangyi Publishing with support from Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA). It’s now sold in Singapore bookstores and online. Her manga was included in Liquid City, a graphic novel anthology published by Image Comics in December, 2008. In July 2010 she began drawing a comic strip for Comma, a weekly newspaper published by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH).
Over the years, she has exhibited in various comic conventions in Singapore, as well as Anime Central (ACen) in Chicago, after winning the grand prize of ACen’s doujin contest. Currently, she’s completing her BFA in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She wants to create in her art a surreal nightmarish dream realm, a world like an entangling spider web, where everything is crawling with pseudo-organic ornamentation and decaying roses.