M. Bennardo’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He is also co-editor of the Machine of Death series of anthologies. He lives in Kent, Ohio. His website is mbennardo.com. Much thanks to Noyes, Byron, Poe, Browning, Eliot, and Shakespeare for their unwilling collaboration on “The Highwayman Come Riding,” and to the compositors of various treasuries of poetry for making the original introductions.
•
Susan Jane Bigelow is a writer, political columnist, and librarian. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex magazine, Lightspeed magazine’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue, and the Lambda Award-winning The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, among others. Her Extrahumans series of novels is being reprinted by Book Smugglers Publishing in 2016, and her Grayline Sisters series is available from Candlemark & Gleam. Susan lives in northern Connecticut with her wife and their cats.
•
Sarah L. Byrne is a scientific copy editor and writer in London, UK. Her short speculative fiction has appeared in various publications, including Ideomancer, Daily Science Fiction and The Future Fire. Her fiction and science writing can be found at sarahbyrne.org.
•
Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and more than a dozen short stories. During his time in the social sciences, he worked on cocoa farming in Ghana, political rumor control, and simulations built to study racial bias in police shootings. He wrote much of the lore and flavor for Bungie Studios’ smash hit Destiny.
•
Ruthanna Emrys lives in a mysterious manor house in the outskirts of Washington DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She makes home-made vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, occasionally attempts to save the world, and blogs sporadically about these things at http://ashnistrike.livejournal.com and http://twitter.com/r_emrys. Her stories have appeared in several venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Analog.
•
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, but now a dual US/UK citizen. Her novels are Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always and Hild. Her essays and short fiction appear in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Among the awards she has won are the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times).
Nicola is married to writer Kelley Eskridge (they live in Seattle). You can find her at nicolagriffith.com, @nicolaz, and facebook.com/nicolagriffith.
•
Vivien Jackson is still waiting for her Hogwarts letter. Don’t you laugh. In the meantime, she writes, mostly fantastical or futuristic or kissing-related stories. When she isn’t writing, she’s performing a sacred duty nurturing the next generation of Whovian Browncoat Sindarin Jedi gamers, and their little dogs too. She has a degree in English, which only means she’s read gobs of stuff in that language. With her similarly geeky partner, she lives in Austin, Texas, and watches a lot of football.
•
Annabeth Leong wears high heels and frequents the former haunts of H.P. Lovecraft. One month, she is a baseball fanatic, and the next she’s reading about squid. She is frequently confused about her sexuality, but enjoys searching for answers. Her work appears in more than fifty anthologies, including the twentieth-anniversary edition of Best Lesbian Erotica and Summer Love: Lesbian Stories of Holiday Romance. Her latest erotic novel is Untouched, from Sweetmeats Press. Find Annabeth online at annabetherotica.com, and on Twitter @AnnabethLeong
•
Darcie Little Badger is a scientist, comic book creater, and speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Mirror Dance, and other magazines. She studies phytoplankton genetics and is earning a PhD in oceanography from Texas A&M University. Her byline, Darcie Little Badger, is an English translation of her Lipan Apache middle name, Altsese Nagoosch’idn.
•
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
•
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not translating from Classical Armenian or researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, Alex writes stories, found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Phantasm Japan, Solaris Rising 3, Gigantic Worlds and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. Alex is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014), and in 2015 joined Sofia Samatar as co-editor of non-fiction and poetry for Interfictions Online. Follow @foxvertebrae on Twitter for more.
•
Seanan McGuire is an American author, born and raised in Northern California, which she remembers as being somewhat less on fire during her childhood. There were more frogs, too. She misses the frogs a lot. She would like a frog. When not trying to avoid being on fire, Seanan writes (an average of four books per year since 2010), reads (voraciously, across multiple genres), games (mostly Pokemon and related titles; she will one day catch ’em all), and wanders into corn fields, which can be quite unnerving for the people she is with. She lives in a crumbling old farmhouse with two enormous blue cats (both Maine Coons), one alligator lizard, and a remarkable collection of comic books, horror movies, and creepy dolls. As her girlfriend once put it, “So many eyes…”
Seanan was the 2010 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which came with a tiara. She feels all awards should come with tiaras. Since then, she has been nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, including one nomination for an album of original filk music, titled Wicked Girls. Seanan enjoys travel, especially when there’s a corn field or a Disney Park on the other end. She also enjoys watching way too much television. If she canceled her cable, she could probably write another three books. This is why her friends are all glad she has cable. Seanan often claims to be the vanguard of an invading race of alien plant people. We really have no good reason to doubt her.
•
Melissa Moorer is an Assistant Editor at The Butter/The Toast. Her work has been published in luminous zines and journals (LCRW, The Future Fire, FLAPPERHOUSE Hot Metal Bridge, Vestal Review, The Northville Review).
•
B R Sanders is a white, genderqueer writer who lives and works in Denver, CO, with their family and two cats. Outside of writing, B has worked as a research psychologist, a labor organizer and a K-12 public education data specialist.
•
Stacia Seaman has edited numerous award-winning titles, and with co-editor Radclyffe has won a Lambda Literary Award, a couple of Independent Publishers Awards medals, several Golden Crown Literary Awards, and the 2010 Rainbow Award of Excellence in the Short/Novella category. Their most recent anthology is Myth & Magic: Queer Fairy Tales. She has short stories in several anthologies and also has essays in Visible: A Femmethology (Homofactus Press, 2009) and Second Person Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009). She enjoys the occasional single malt and rarely says no to a game of Cards Against Humanity.
•
Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.
•
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: bonniejostufflebeam.com.
•
Writing by Shannon Connor Winward has appeared or is forthcoming in Pseudopod, Artemis Rising, Pedestal Magazine, Gargoyle, Strange Horizons, Stupefying Stories, Spinetingler Magazine, Star*Line, Scigentasy, Flash Fiction Online, Literary Mama, PANK and the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2012 anthology of Rhysling Award nominees. A Semi-Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest, Shannon was also runner-up for an emerging artist fellowship in literature by the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2014 and 2015. Her debut poetry chapbook, Undoing Winter (Finishing Line Press, 2014), was nominated for an SFPA Elgin award. Shannon lives and writes in Newark, Delaware.
•