Charlie Jane Anders is the author of a brand new young adult space opera, Victories Greater Than Death. Her writing advice, Never Say You Can’t Survive, comes out in August. She co-hosts the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast.
Anya Johanna DeNiro was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. She received a BA in English from the College of Wooster and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. She’s also a 1998 graduate of the Clarion Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared widely, in venues such as Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, One Story, Interfictions,Catapult, and Shimmer. She’s the author of two collection of short stories, both published by Small Beer Press, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (2006) and Tyrannia (2013); and a novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009) (as Alan DeNiro). She’s also been shortlisted for the O.Henry Award, and a finalist for the Crawford Award and Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Innocent Chizaram Ilo is Igbo. They live in Lagos and write to make sense of the world around them. Their works have been published or are forthcoming in Escape Pod, Granta, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Catapult, Fireside Fiction, Reckoning Press, Cast of Wonders, Strange Horizons, BBC Culture and elsewhere. They are the winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (African Region) and a finalist of the Otherwise (formerly James Triptree) and Lambda awards.
Gem Isherwood is an author of speculative fiction whose work is often influenced by folklore, fairy tales and the Gothic. She lives on a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea populated by fairies, ghosts and cats with no tails. You can find her on Twitter @GemIsWriting.
Naomi Kanakia is the author of two novels (Enter Title Here, Disney ’16) and We Are Totally Normal (HarperTeen, ’20). Additionally, her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Gulf Coast, The Indiana Review, and West Branch, and her poetry has appeared in Soundings East, The American Journal of Poetry, and Vallum. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter. If you want to know more you can visit her blog at www.blotter-paper.com or follow her on Twitter at @rahkan.
Gwen C. Katz is a bisexual author, artist, game designer, and Nazi-puncher who lives in Pasadena, California with her husband and a revolving door of transient animals. Her first novel, Among the Red Stars, tells the story of Russia’s famous all-female bomber regiment known as the Night Witches. She’s published around a dozen short stories in venues like Glittership and Curiosities. Some of her favorite artists include Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini, the three women who loosely inspired this story. Find her online at gwenckatz.com or on Twitter and Instagram at @gwenckatz.
Kristen Koopman is a graduate student, writer, and nerd. Her interests include blatant escapism, overanalyzing anything and everything, playing with her dog, and consuming enough garlic to kill vampires at twenty paces. Other stories of hers can be found at Kaleidotrope, Toasted Cake, and forthcoming in It Gets Even Better: Stories of Queer Possibility. She is definitely not two smaller Kristen Koopmans in a trenchcoat.
R.B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Ukraine, Russia, and Israel to the US. R.B.’s novella The Four Profound Weaves (Tachyon, 2020) is a finalist for the Nebula award. Their novel The Unbalancing is forthcoming from Tachyon in 2022. You can find R.B. on Twitter at @rb_lemberg, on Patreon at
patreon.com/rblemberg, and at their website rblemberg.net.
L.D. Lewis is an award-winning SF/F writer and editor, and serves as a founding creator, Art Director, and Project Manager for the World Fantasy Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated FIYAH Literary Magazine. She is the author of A Ruin of Shadows (Dancing Star Press, 2018) and her published short fiction includes appearances in FIYAH, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Strange Horizons, and Fireside Magazine, among others. She lives in Georgia with her coffee habit and an impressive Funko Pop! collection. Visit her website at ldlewiswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @ellethevillain.
Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan, now living in Washington, D.C. Her short fiction has appeared in venues including Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Shimmer. Her debut novella Sisters of the Vast Black, about nuns living in a giant slug in outer space, was published by Tor.Com Publishing in October 2019. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook, go hiking, and collect terrible 90s comic books. Find out more about her and her writing at linarather.com or on Twitter
@LinaRather.
Nicasio Andres Reed is a queer, trans, Filipino-American writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, Fireside, and Shimmer. He lives in Tagaytay, in the Philippines, with four dogs, some family, and the occasional uninvited monitor lizard. You can find more of his work at nicasioreed.com.
Gabriela Santiago has previously been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among others. She is also the founder and curator of the science fiction cabaret Revolutionary Jetpacks, centering the futures imagined by BIPOC, queer and trans, and disabled artists. Follow her at writing-relatedactivities.tumblr.com or
@LifeOnEarth89 on Twitter.
Waverly SM is a speculative fiction writer preoccupied with apocalypses, impossible choices, and the ambient trauma of living in the world. They’re a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow whose work has appeared in Reckoning 4, Stim: An Autism Anthology, Lucent Dreaming, SAND, and Lucky Pierre Magazine. They can currently be found trying to approximate the anchorite lifestyle in Oxford, or more expediently at www.waverlysm.com.
Carlie St. George is a Clarion West graduate with stories in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and multiple other magazines and anthologies. When not writing about fairy tales and the families you make for yourself, she talks a lot about movies and television on her blog My Geek Blasphemy.
Brendan Williams-Childs is a speculative fiction writer originally from Wyoming. His work has appeared in Nat. Brut, Catapult, on NPR, and in various anthologies, including the Lambda-nominated Meanwhile Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Authors and Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World that Wouldn’t Die.
John (@Wiswell) is an ace/aro writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He is a finalist for the 2021 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award, and his fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nature Futures, and Cast of Wonders. This story was inspired by his lifetime love of games as a medium for entertainment, narrative, and social bonding. Dragon Quest is every bit as much a reason he’s a writer as The Hobbit is.