PAT CADIGAN
Pat Cadigan was born in New York, grew up in Massachusetts, spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area, and now lives in London, in the UK. She has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels, Synners and Fools, as well as the Locus Award for best short story—“Angel”—and best collection—Patterns. Although her novel-length work to date is exclusively science fiction, a good percentage of her shorter fiction has been fantasy and horror. Now that she lives in London, she expects to write a lot more in those genres as she wanders through some of the older and more shadowy places, particularly in North London where she lives with her son Rob and her husband, the Original Chris Fowler (not to be confused with the author of Roofworld).
JONATHAN CARROLL
Jonathan Carroll is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Voice of Our Shadow, Bones of the Moon, From the Teeth of Angels, After Silence, Black Cocktail, Outside the Dog Museum, A Child Across the Sky, Kissing the Beehive, The Marriage of Sticks, The Wooden Sea, Glass Soup, and The Ghost in Love. He has won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Friend’s Best Man” and his short fiction as been collected in The Panic Hand.
From the publication of his first novel Land of Laughs, Carroll has been delighting readers with his memorable characters and his overflowing imagination. He has the ability to swerve unerringly between science fiction, fantasy, and horror—often.
SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS
Suzy McKee Charnas is a born-and-raised New Yorker. After two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, she taught in private school in New York and then worked with a high school drug-abuse treatment program. In 1969 she married, and moved to New Mexico, where she began writing fiction full-time.
Her first novel, Walk to the End of the World (1974), was a Campbell award finalist. The cycle of four books that sprang from Walk ended in 1999 with The Conqueror’s Child, which won the James P.Tiptree Award. Her SF and fantasy books and stories have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, and the Mythopoeic award for young-adult fantasy. Her play Vampire Dreams has been staged several times, and a collection of her stories and essays, Stagestruck Vampires, was published in 2004.
She lectures and teaches about SF, fantasy, and vampires whenever she gets the chance to, most recently in a writing workshop at the University of New Mexico. Her website is at www.suzymckeecharnas.com.
MELISSA MIA HALL
Melissa Mia Hall’s short fiction’s been published in various format and languages for over twenty years, most recently in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, Front Lines, Baen’s Universe website (a collaboration with Joe R. Lansdale), Retro Pulp Tales ed. by Joe R. Lansdale, and Cross Plains Universe. She edited and contributed to the anthology Wild Women. Her story, “Psychofemmes” was reprinted in The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories in 1998.
A veteran book industry journalist and fiction author, Hall’s critical work appears in Publishers Weekly, various newspapers and online venues, in non-fiction books such as Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S.T.Joshi, and Supernatural Literature of the World, edited by S.T.Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz, and most recently in The Book of Lists—Horror: An All-New Collection of Spine-Tingling, Hair-Raising Blood-Curdling Fun and Facts compiled by Amy Wallace, Scott Bradley, and Del Howison.
Robert Holdstock is the author of several novels and collections, including his “Mythago’ Cycle: The Bone Forest, Lavondyss, The Hollowing, Gate of Ivory, and Mythago Wood, which received the World Fantasy Award in 1985 and was aptly hailed by Alan Garner as “a new expression of the British genius for true fantasy.” His more recent work is “The Merlin Codex’: Celtika, The Iron Grail, and The Broken Kings. Holdstock was born in rural Kent but has made London his home for a quarter of a century.
K.W. JETER
K. W. Jeter was born in Los Angeles in 1950. He has written some very edgy novels, including Dr. Adder, The Glass Hammer, and Infernal Devices. He has also had a number of short stories published. His work defies classification.
Garry Kilworth has been writing short stories for thirty-five years now and is still fired with enthusiasm for the medium. In 2006 PS Publishing brought out his collection Moby Jack and Other Tall Tales which covers ten years of stories. The same publisher will be bringing out Tales From The Fragrant Harbour, a collection of original general fiction stories written while the author lived in Hong Kong, paired with a collection of fantastical tales also penned in the same location. The first half will be subtitled “Once-Told Tales” and the second section “Twice-Told Tales” (thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne, much admired). Garry Kilworth lives in England some of the time and in various other countries the rest of the year.
KATHE KOJA
Kathe Koja writes novels for adults and for young people (sometimes the same books). She lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and their cats.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
Thomas Ligotti is recognized as a contemporary master in the genre of horror fiction and his work has been compared to that of classic horror writers Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.
He has received several awards, including the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award for his collection The Nightmare Factory and short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done.
Ligotti’s latest collection of stories is Teatro Grottesco, published by Durtro Press. A short film of his story “The Frolic” is available on a DVD. In addition, a graphic novel based on works from Ligotti’s 1996 collection The Nightmare Factory was released in 2007, with a second volume scheduled to appear in 2008.
Barry N. Malzberg’s collected essays on science fiction, Breakfast in the Ruins, was published in the Spring of 2007; the book conflates his 1982 classic Engines of the Night and all of the essays published since. His collection In the Stone House was published in 2000; several of his 1970s science fiction novels have been reissued within the past half-decade.
Malzberg’s body of work includes a fair amount of novels (The Cross of Fire) and short stories concerned with religion but “The Passion of Azazel” is only the third work which has dealt with the Judaic. (Two 1970s short stories appear in Jack Dann’s anthology More Wandering Stars.) He has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over forty years; his first story, “We’re Coming Through the Windows” (Galaxy 8/67) was sold on February 11,1967. With a fetching smile and an indescribable moue, Malzberg further notes that these last years of his seventh decade are becoming, unsurprisingly, a tortuous slog.
ELIZABETH MASSIE
Elizabeth Massie is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author whose books include Sineater, Wire Mesh Mothers, Welcome Back to the Night, Shadow Dreams, Twisted Branch (as “Chris Blaine”), Homeplace, King Takes Queen (a novelization of the second season of Showtime’s The Tudors), and many others. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection, Best New Horror 2 and 17, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook, The Spider Chronicles, and more. In addition to writing, she is the creator of the Skeeryvilletown cartoon universe, featuring 3-Eyed Devil Cat, Fire Breathing Dog O’Death, Boo Boy, Wolfie, and the rest of the bizarre gang.
She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with illustrator Cortney Skinner.
David J. Schow has a pyramid of chromed skulls on his TV set. His wardrobe is predominantly black, his sunglasses are quite dark, and he only comes out at night. He is known primarily in the horror field for his powerful, award-winning short fiction, and for editing Silver Scream, arguably the first splatterpunk anthology. His novel debut was The Kill Riff, his “rock’n’roll horror novel,” and his second was The Shaft, his “sex and drugs horror novel.” In 1989 he branched out into films and television, scripting the unsavory activities of such social lions as Leatherface and Freddy Krueger. His short fiction has been collected in Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required, Crypt Orchids, Eye, Zombie Jam, and Havoc Swims Jaded.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Robert Silverberg was born in New York City, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. His first book, Revolt on Alpha C, was published in 1955. He is the winner of four Hugo awards and five Nebula awards as well as most of the other significant science fiction honors. He is the author of over one hundred books and an uncounted number of short stories, which have appeared in such magazines as Omni, Playboy, and Penthouse, and have been widely anthologized. Among his best-known book titles are Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Gilgamesh the King, Lord Valentine’s Castle, Born with the Dead, and Nightfall (with Isaac Asimov). He has edited the Alpha and New Dimensions anthology series and, with his wife Karen Haber, the Universe anthologies of original science fiction.
MELINDA M. SNODGRASS
Melinda Snodgrass was born in Los Angeles, but her family moved to New Mexico when she was five months old so she considers herself a native New Mexican.
After practicing law for three years, she realized that while she loved the study of law she didn’t particularly love lawyers so she quit to pursue a career in writing. She wrote numerous science fiction novels, and helped edit and wrote for the Wild Cards anthologies. In 1988 she accepted a job on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and began her Hollywood career.
Her most recent Hollywood position was as Consulting Producer on the N.B.C. show Profiler. She has written television pilots and feature films for Disney. In addition she has written a number of freelance episodes for various television shows.
She is working on an occult thriller series for Tor books, and she is hard at work on her story for the new Wild Cards Anthology. She is also putting the final polish on a spec pilot which she is writing with Ian Tregillis. Her passion (aside from writing) is riding Grand Prix dressage on her Lusitano stallion Vento da Broga.
THOMAS TESSIER
Thomas Tessier is the author of several novels of horror and suspense, including Nightwalker, Finishing Touches, Rapture, and Wicked Things. His novel Fog Heart won the International Horror Guild Award, as did his first collection of short stories, Ghost Music and Other Tales. He lives in Connecticut and is working on a new novel.
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
Karl Edward Wagner’s first novel, Darkness Weaves, was published in 1970. He wrote or edited more than forty books over the course of his career, including his collections In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I?, Exorcisms and Ecstasies, and Midnight Sun: The Collected Stories of Kane; and (as editor), fifteen volumes of the annual Year’s Best Horror Stories series from 1980 to 1994. He won four British Fantasy Awards and two World Fantasy Awards.
RICK WILBER
Rick Wilber’s most recent book is My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball. His thriller, The Cold Road, was published in 2003, and his short-story collection, Where Garagiola Waits, was short-listed in 1999 for the Dave Moore Award for most important baseball book of the year. Wilber’s short stories and poetry has appeared in magazines and newspapers such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly, The Tampa Tribune, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch. He was editor for a dozen years of Fiction Quarterly, the short-story supplement of The Tampa Tribune, and later was fiction editor at GalaxyOnline.com. He has had more than fifty short stories and a similar number of poems in print as well as several hundred feature stories, reviews and essays.
He is a journalism professor at the University of South Florida and also writes college textbooks on writing, editing, and mass-media studies. His website is www.rickwilber.com.
JACK WOMACK
Jack Womack is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone.
He was in 1994 a co-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and currently works as Publicity Manager for all science fiction and fantasy titles at HarperCollins Publishers.
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
A professional writer for forty years, Yarbro has sold eighty-five books and more than ninety works of short fiction, essays, and reviews. She also composes serious music. She lives in her hometown—Berkeley, California—with three autocratic cats. In 2003, the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award; the International Horror Guild honored her as a Living Legend in 2006.