John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, among other venues. His translations have been published or are forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of Science Fiction, and other venues. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
Leah Cypess is the author of four young adult fantasy novels, starting with Mistwood (HarperCollins 2010). Her short fiction has been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. Leah lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her family. You can read more about her and her writing at www.leahcypess.com.
Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer and editor from Kolkata, India. He is a Lambda Literary Award winner for his debut novel The Devourers (Penguin India/Del Rey), and has been a finalist for the Crawford, Tiptree, and Shirley Jackson Awards. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has been widely anthologized. He is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012. He has lived in India, the United States, and Canada, where he completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia.
Amal El-Mohtar’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, and her poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times. She writes the “Otherworldly” column for the New York Times Book Review, and is the author, with Max Gladstone, of This Is How You Lose the Time War, an epistolary spy vs. spy novella co-written across time and space. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories, and The New Voices of Fantasy; in magazines such as Tor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside; and in her own collection of poems and very short stories, The Honey Month. She lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com or on Twitter as @tithenai.
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. 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. Ford’s fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies and has been widely translated. He lives in Ohio in an old farmhouse surrounded by corn and soybean fields and teaches part-time at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Hugo Award winner Sarah Gailey lives and works in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and their fiction has been published internationally. They are a regular contributor for Tor.com and the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog. You can find links to their work at www.sarahgailey.com. They tweet as @gaileyfrey.
Carlos Hernandez is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria (Rosarium 2016) and most recently, as part of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint of Disney Hyperion, the novel Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (2019). By day, Carlos is an associate professor of English at the City University of New York, with appointments at BMCC and the Graduate Center, and a game designer and enthusiast. Catch him on Twitter as @writeteachplay.
Kat Howard is the author of the novels Roses and Rot and the Alex Award–winning An Unkindness of Magicians, as well as the short fiction collection A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was an NPR best book of the year in 2014. She currently lives in New Hampshire.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels, six story collections, and, so far, one comic book. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This Is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.
T. Kingfisher is the pen name for Ursula Vernon, or possibly the other way around. She is the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Digger, “Jackalope Wives,” Clockwork Boys, and various other oddities. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and his chickens.
Ann Leckie is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novel Ancillary Justice. She has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Guernica, The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and—after some time in Turkey, Canada, and Sweden—lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. Find her online at arkadymartine.net or on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine.
Seanan McGuire is an American author living and working in the Pacific Northwest. Since her debut in 2009, she has published more than forty novels and has been the recipient of the Campbell, Alex, Hugo, Nebula, and Pegasus Awards. Seanan spends a somewhat daunting amount of time wandering through cornfields, and knew how to take a Ferris wheel apart by the time she was twelve. Strangely enough, this is not a particularly marketable skill. Seanan watches too many horror movies, can be located in a crowd by singing the opening phrase of almost any Broadway show, and can be found most easily at www.seananmcguire.com.
Naomi Novik is the acclaimed author of the Temeraire series and the Nebula-winning novel Uprooted, a fantasy influenced by the Polish fairy tales of her childhood. She is a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own. Her latest novel, Spinning Silver, is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin.
Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula and Hugo Award–winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Her novel Trail of Lightning (Book 1 in the Sixth World Series) was selected as an Amazon, B&N, Library Journal, and NRP Best Book of 2018, among others, and is a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award finalist for 2019. Book 2 in the Sixth World Series, Storm of Locusts, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her next novel, Resistance Reborn, is part of Star Wars: Journey to the Rise of Skywalker and is out in November 2019. Her middle-grade novel Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan Presents imprint will release in January 2020. Her short fiction can be found in Apex Magazine and in New Suns and various other anthologies. Her nonfiction can be found in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation (Macmillan). She lives in northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pups. Find more at rebeccaroanhorse.com and on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex.
JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters), which have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus Awards and were on the Honor List for the Tiptree Award. Their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed. Find them on Twitter as @halleluyang.
Alyssa Wong’s stories have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson Awards. She lives in California.