ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ELEANOR ARNASON was born in Manhattan and grew up in New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Washington, DC, Honolulu, St. Paul, and Minneapolis. Since her first professional sale in 1972, she has published six novels and over forty works of short fiction. Her novel, A Woman of the Iron People, won the inaugural James Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Society Award. Story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. Other stories have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula Awards. Arnason lives in Minnesota where she used to make her living as a financial manager. Now retired, her interests include politics, birdwatching, and exploring the remains of the Great Lakes industrial belt.
MEGAN CHEE is a Singaporean writer who has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, and is currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Lightspeed, Luna Station Quarterly, Nature Futures, Cast of Wonders, Strange Horizons, and other venues.
Born in New York and raised in Houston, Texas, and Trinidad and Tobago, P. DJÈLÍ CLARK is the author of the novels Abeni’s Song, A Master of Djinn, and the award-winning and Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon nominated author of the novellas Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums, and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories have appeared in venues such as Tor.com*, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. An academic historian, he currently resides in a small Edwardian castle in New England with his wife, daughters, and pet dragon (who suspiciously resembles a Boston Terrier).
KARYN DÍAZ is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Their work has appeared in Baffling, FIYAH, and Eye to the Telescope. They take inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson. When not writing, they engage in other forms of creation.
AMAL EL-MOHTAR writes fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com*, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium as well as various anthologies and her own collection, The Honey Month. She is coauthor, with Max Gladstone, of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Aurora, and British Science Fiction and Fantasy Award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War. El-Mohtar’s articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Books, and on Tor.com*. She has been the New York Times’s science fiction and fantasy columnist for more than five years.
A writer of speculative fiction and a Sturgeon, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Award finalist, R. S. A. GARCIA lives in Trinidad and Tobago with an extended family and too many cats. Her Amazon bestselling science fiction mystery, Lex Talionis, received the Silver Medal for Best Scifi/Fantasy/Horror Ebook from the Independent Publishers Awards. Garcia’s short fiction has been published in venues including Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Strange Horizon, The Sunday Morning Transport, and Internazionale Magazine.
S. M. HALLOW is a Pushcart Prize nominee, part-time fairytale witch, and full-time vampire. Hallow’s stories, poems, and visual art can be found in Baffling, CatsCast, Final Girl Bulletin Board, Prismatica, Seize the Press, and Taco Bell Quarterly among others.
Based in New York City, ISABEL J. KIM is a Korean-American speculative fiction writer. She is a Shirley Jackson Award winner and was a finalist for the 2023 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Kim’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex, Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, khōréō, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she’s either practicing law or cohosting her Internet culture podcast Wow if True—both equally noble pursuits.
KEN LIU is the recipient of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. He wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Sky-walker. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.
MALDA MARLYS teaches science just outside Chicago and writes the sort of speculative fiction that requires too many qualifiers for the normal flow of conversation. Fortunately, the SFFH umbrella is wide (and kind of spooky and full of brass fittings and snakes). Eir short fiction has appeared in Fantasy, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and Strange Horizons, among other wild places and dark corners. An out-of-practice black belt, mediocre birdwatcher, and terrible knitter, ey spends most of eir time being bullied by disreputable house pets and adding to a monumental TBR pile.
MARGARET RONALD’s short fiction has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy, and over ten times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including a series of stand-alone stories set in the same steampunk world as well as an ongoing series of fantasy mysteries. Ronald has also authored novels Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, an urban fantasy series. Story “The Witch’s Knives” was a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Short Story Award. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.
A Greek author and artist with a flair for dark things, EUGENIA TRI-ANTAFYLLOU’s work has been nominated for the Ignyte, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. You can find her stories in Tor.com*, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, and other venues. She currently lives in Athens with a boy and a dog.
E. CATHERINE TOBLER has sold more than 120 science fiction and fantasy short stories, some of which are collected in collection The Grand Tour. Her Clarkesworld story, “To See the Other (Whole Against the Sky)” was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. Tobler has published seven novels with small press markets and coedited the fantasy anthology Sword & Sonnet, which was on the Ditmar, Aurealis, and World Fantasy Award ballots. In 2019, her thirteen-year run as editor at Shimmer Magazine made her a Hugo and World Fantasy finalist. She currently edits speculative magazine The Deadlands.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling creator of over forty works of speculative fiction, including the Fairyland novels, Space Opera, The Glass Town Game, Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and Radiance. She has been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, and has won the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree), Hugo, and Andre Norton Awards. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine.
NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle. The series entries have been finalists for the Locus Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte Award, and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.
FRAN WILDE’s first novel Updraft won a Nebula and a Compton Crook Award. Novels Cloudbound and Horizon completed the trilogy. Her debut middle-grade novel Riverland won a Nebula and was named an NPR Best Book. Middle-grade novel The Ship of Stolen Words was published in 2021 and fantasy novella The Book of Gems completed the Gemworld trilogy in 2023. Wilde’s short work has appeared in Asimov’s, Tor.com*, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, Uncanny, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, Tor.com*, and elsewhere. The managing editor of The Sunday Morning Transport, Wilde teaches for Saint Mary’s College of Maryland.
E. LILY YU is the author of the novel On Fragile Waves, which won the Washington State Book Award; the story collection Jewel Box; and the nonfiction book Break, Blow, Burn, and Make. She has also received the Artist Trust LaSalle Storyteller Award and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. More than forty of her stories have appeared in venues from McSweeney’s to Boston Review, as well as thirteen best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.