Peter Atkins was born in Liverpool, England and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder, and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV, Wishmaster, and Prisoners of the Sun. His short fiction has appeared in such bestselling anthologies as The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, and Hellbound Hearts. He is the co-founder, with Dennis Etchison and Glen Hirshberg, of The Rolling Darkness Revue, who tour the west coast annually bringing ghost stories and live music to any venue that’ll put up with them. A new collection of his short fiction, Rumours of the Marvellous, was recently shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He blogs at www.peteratkins.blogspot.com.
Richard Bowes has won major and minor awards, published seven books and many, many stories. His Lambda-winning novel Minions of the Moon will be reprinted by Lethe Press in late 2012. Other recent and forthcoming appearances include The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Icarus, Apex, Jenny, and anthologies The Million Writers Award: The Best Online SF & Fantasy, After, Wilde Stories 2012, Bloody Fabulous, and Hauntings.
Laird Barron’s first novel, The Croning, was published earlier this year. His most recent story collection, Occultation, and novella Mysterium Tremendum both received Shirley Jackson Awards in 2011. An earlier collection, The Imago Sequence, was also a Jackson award winner. His fiction has appeared in SciFiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies and is frequently reprinted in various “year’s best” anthologies.
Steve Duffy’s third collection of short supernatural fiction, Tragic Life Stories, was published in 2010. A fourth collection, The Moment of Panic, is due out soon, and will include the International Horror Guild award-winning short story included here, “The Rag-and-Bone Men.” Duffy lives in North Wales.
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, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His new collection, Crackpot Palace, was published recently. Ford is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and five short story collections. Her novel The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Sister Noon was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Both Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season were New York Times Notable Books as well. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was short-listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999; her collection What I Didn’t See also won the 2011 World Fantasy Award.
Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and (with Terry Pratchett) Good Omens; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. He has won numerous literary awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Stoker Awards, as well as the Newbery medal.
Winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild awards, Stephen Gallagher is a novelist, screenwriter, and director specializing in contemporary suspense. His television work began with the BBC’s Doctor Who series and includes miniseries adaptations of his novels Chimera and Oktober. He was lead writer on NBC’s Crusoe and wrote for Jerry Bruckheimer’s U.S. version of Eleventh Hour, the series he created for British TV in 2006. The Bedlam Detective was published in 2012 and he’s now working on a third Sebastian Becker novel. The author’s website is www.stephengallagher.com.
Elizabeth Hand (www.elizabethhand.com) is the multiple-award-winning author of twelve novels and three collections of short fiction. Her most recent novel for adults, Available Dark, was named as one of the Top Ten Best Mystery/Thrillers of the year by Publishers Weekly. Radiant Days, a young adult novel, was published earlier this year as well. A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Author, Hand is also a longtime book critic and essayist who frequently contributes to the Washington Post, Salon, Village Voice, and DownEast Magazine, among many others. She has two children and divides her time between Maine and North London.
Glen Hirshberg’s awards include the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award (for his novelette, “The Janus Tree”) and three International Horror Guild Awards, including two for Best Collection (for American Morons in 2006 and The Two Sams in 2003). He is also the author of two novels, The Snowman’s Children and The Book of Bunk. A third, Motherless Child, will be published fall 2012. His latest collection is The Janus Tree and Other Stories (Subterranean Press). With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a traveling ghost story performance troupe that tours the west coast of the United States and elsewhere each October. His fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of Moonshine and Wicked City, urban fantasy novels set in the Lower East Side of 1920s New York City. She has also written Racing the Dark and The Burning City, the first two books of a fantasy trilogy called The Spirit Binders. Her YA debut, The Summer Prince, will be published in spring 2013. Her short stories have appeared in the anthologies Welcome to Bordertown and Zombies Vs. Unicorns. She can be contacted via her website, www.alayadawnjohnson.com.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of ten novels and two collections. Most recent are Zombie Bake-Off and Growing Up Dead in Texas. Next are The Last Final Girl and Flushboy. Stephen’s been a Stoker finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Black Quill finalist, and has been an NEA fellow and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction. He teaches in the MFA program at University of Colorado Boulder and in the low-res MFA at UCR Palm Desert.
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including the award-winning Threshold, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and, most recently, The Drowning Girl. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. Subterranean Press published a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) last year. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn.
Marc Laidlaw is the author of six novels, including the International Horror Guild Award winner, The 37th Mandala. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. In 1997, he joined Valve Software as a writer and creator of Half-Life, which has become one of the most popular videogame series of all time. He lives in Washington State with his wife and two daughters, and continues to writes occasional short fiction between playing too many videogames.
Margo Lanagan writes novels and short stories. Her collection Black Juice was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, won two World Fantasy Awards, two Aurealis Awards, two Ditmar Awards and a Victorian Premier’s Prize, and was shortlisted for several other awards including a Hugo and a Nebula. The collection Red Spikes was the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Margo’s novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her latest novel is The Brides of Rollrock Island (Sea Hearts in Australia), and her fourth collection will be Yellowcake. She lives in Sydney.
John Langan is the author of a novel, House of Windows, and a collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. He recently co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters with Paul Tremblay. Langan lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of mutually suspicious cats.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His novella, Bubba Ho-tep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. Both were directed by Don Coscarelli. His works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, eight Bram Stoker awards, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others. All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, his first novel for young adults, was published last year. His most recent novel for adults is Edge of Dark Water.
Maureen F. McHugh has published four novels and two collections of short stories. She’s won a Hugo and a Tiptree award. Her most recent collection, After the Apocalypse, was named a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Best Book of 2011, was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist, a Story Prize Notable Book, and named to the io9 Best SF&F Books of 2011 List as well as the Tiptree Award Honor List. McHugh lives in Los Angeles, where she is attempting to sell her soul to the entertainment industry.
Sarah Monette lives in a 106-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. The Bone Key, a 2007 collection of interrelated short stories, was re-issued last year in a new edition. A non-themed collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, was published in 2011. Sarah has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.
Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorized biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and five collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the latest is Mrs Midnight (Tartarus, 2011). His novel, The Dracula Papers I: The Scholar’s Tale (Chomu, 2011), is the first of a projected four and he is now working on the second volume, The Monk’s Tale. An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series. His stories have appeared in over thirty anthologies.
Richard Parks has been writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy longer than he cares to remember . . . or probably can remember. His work has appeared in (among many others) Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several “year’s best” anthologies. His second print novel, To Break the Demon Gate, is due out in late 2012 or early 2013 from PS Publishing. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3”(www.richard-parks.com).
James Van Pelt teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. His fiction has made numerous appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines. His first collection of stories, Strangers and Beggars, was recognized as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His second collection, The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories, includes the Nebula-finalist title story, and was a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award. His novel Summer of the Apocalypse was released November 2006. The recently released The Radio Magician and Other Stories received the Colorado Book Award. James blogs at jimvanpelt.livejournal.com.
Tim Powers is the author of twelve novels, including The Anubis Gates, Declare, Hide Me Among the Graves, and On Stranger Tides, which was adapted for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same title. His novels have twice won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, twice won the World Fantasy Award, and four times won the Locus Poll Award. Powers has taught fiction writing classes at the University of Redlands, Chapman University, and the Orange County High School of the Arts. He has been an instructor at the Writers of the Future program and the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop at Michigan State University. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California.
Barbara Roden is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and publisher, and a World Fantasy Award-nominated writer whose first collection, Northwest Passages, was published in 2009. She was born in Vancouver, B.C., and spent several years in the hotel industry in that city in the 1980s. She worked the graveyard shift for eighteen months, and drew on that experience when writing “The Palace.” In a letter to August Derleth, ghost story writer H.R. Wakefield said, “Night-working life is a thing apart & those who live it souls apart,” and that sense of being caught up in “a thing apart” is very much what the author had in mind with the story. She also drew on two notorious cases of real-life murder: the Yorkshire Ripper murders in England in the 1970s, and the serial killings in what’s now known as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—the setting for “The Palace”—between the 1980s and the early twenty-first century. Several of the characters in the story are based on real people, none more so than Sylvia, the Poe-reading desk clerk; readers can make the obvious conclusion from the fact that the Penguin edition of Poe that Sylvia reads still forms part of the author’s collection (and the keen-eyed might spot, in the story’s structure, a homage to Poe’s poem “The Haunted Palace”).
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as forthcoming Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.
Nisi Shawl’s story collection Filter House won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Something More and More, a collection of stories and essays, celebrates her WisCon 35 Guest of Honor status. Shawl is the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach; a founder of the Carl Brandon Society; and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. With Dr. Rebecca Holden, Shawl co-edited Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Feminism, and African American Voices, forthcoming in 2013 from Aqueduct Press. She edits reviews for the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a literary quarterly. Recently published online fiction includes “Black Betty” at Crossed Genres, and “Honorary Earthling” at Expanded Horizons.
John Shirley is the author of more than thirty novels. The latest, Everything Is Broken, was published earlier this year. His numerous short stories have been compiled into eight collections including Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside, winner of the Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, and named as one of the best one hundred books of the year by Publishers Weekly and, most recently, In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley. He has written scripts for television and film, and is best known as co-writer of The Crow. As a musician, Shirley has fronted several bands over the years and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. To learn more about John Shirley and his work, please visit his website at john-shirley.com.
Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, A Dark Matter, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction. Straub edited the Library of America’s edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Tales as well as the Library of America’s two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, thirteen Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the HWA’s Life Achievement Award and, in 2008, both the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers.
Melanie Tem is the author of twelve novels and many short stories. She received a Bram Stoker Award for her debut novel, Prodigal, and the Icarus Award from the British Fantasy Society. Crossroad Press recently released the ebook version of In Concert, collecting all her collaborations with husband Steve Rasnic Tem. Their co-written novella The Man on the Ceiling won the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and International Horror Guild Awards.
Steve Rasnic Tem is the author of over three hundred published works. His latest novel is Deadfall Hotel (Solaris Books). Fall 2012 will see publication of Ugly Behavior collecting the best of his noir fiction, from New Pulp Press. In 2013 ChiZine will publish Celestial Inventories, collecting the best of his recent contemporary fantasy and slipstream fiction.