ABOUT THE AUTHOR
N.R.M. Roshak lives in Ottawa, Canada, with a spouse, a young child, an elderly cat, and a revolving menagerie that currently includes a pet slug and a cannibalistic brine shrimp. The author writes:
“I grew up reading my father’s extensive SF/F collection, from Asimov to Zelazny. I loved science, but even more, I loved imagining myself into alien points of view: what would it be like to be human-but-not, or human-but-other? I had planned to study science at university, until I read Thomas Nagel’s famous paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ which argues that we can never know what it’s like to be a bat, only what it’s like to be a human having bat experiences. To a longtime imaginer of self-as-other, this was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I plunged into the argument, only realizing once I held a philosophy-and-math degree that I greatly prefer imagining to arguing.
“I’m often asked what one can do with a degree in philosophy and math, other than philosophy of math. For me, the answer was a career in IT. After many years wrangling data and databases, and a few wrangling a small child, I’ve returned to imagining. I may never know what it is like to be a bat, a telepath, or an alien; but there’s much to be learned in the imagining, to explore what it means to be human by imagining what it is to be partly or wholly inhuman.”
The author cordially invites you to visit http://nrmroshak.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Jazmen Richardson was born in 1998 in Auburn, New York. Living in the middle of nowhere most of her life, her imagination was able to roam through the fields surrounding her home.
Jazmen has been drawing and creating stories since she could walk and hold a pencil. Whether they made sense to the viewer or not at the time, each story’s characters were as real to her as another family member.
Though her family is full of creative hearts, she is the first to pursue it as a career.
After graduating a year early from high school to pursue an artistic mentorship, Jazmen was able to attend Ringling College of Art and Design of Sarasota, Florida to study illustration and the business of art and design.
She has been working in digital art for two years now, and is moving toward a specialty in oil painting.
Jazmen concurrently works convention-like events striving to make connections with other artists and improve herself and her work. She may be quiet, but there is nothing more gratifying than meeting new faces and experiencing stories other than her own.