LAIRD BARRON spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Swift to Chase, and Worse Angels. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.
GEMMA FILES was born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, and has been a journalist, teacher, film critic and an award-winning horror author for almost thirty years. She has published four novels, a story-cycle, three collections of short fiction, and three collections of speculative poetry; her most recent novel, Experimental Film, won both the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel (Adult Category). She is currently working on her next book.
JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, Ahab’s Return. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, The Best of Jeffrey Ford, and a new collection out in July 2021, Big Dark Hole from Small Beer Press.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the author of twenty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Only Good Indians and Night of the Mannequins. Next is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
ELIZABETH HAND is the author of sixteen multiple-award-winning novels and collections of short fiction including Curious Toys, Wylding Hall, Generation Loss, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, her fourth noir featuring punk provocateur and photographer Cass Neary. Her stand-alone thriller, Under the Big Black Sun, will be out in 2022. Under non-pandemic conditions, she divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.
KAREN HEULER’S stories have appeared in over one hundred literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Conjunctions to Clarkesworld to Weird Tales, as well as in a number of Best Of anthologies. She has received an O. Henry Award, been a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Bellwether Award, the Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction, and others. She has published four novels, four collections, and a novella.
RICHARD KADREY is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and is in production as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, The Everything Box, Hollywood Dead, and Butcher Bird. He’s also written for Heavy Metal Magazine, and the comics Lucifer and Hellblazer.
CASSANDRA KHAW is an award-winning game writer, and former scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal. Her work can be found in places like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Her first original novella, Hammers on Bone, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award, and her forthcoming novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, will be published by Nightfire in September 2021.
JOHN LANGAN is the author of two novels and four collections of stories. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror awards. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and certainly not too many books.
KELLY LINK is a MacArthur recipient and the author of four collections, most recently Get in Trouble. She is the owner of the bookstore Book Moon in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and the cofounder, with her husband Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. Together they publish the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can find her on Twitter at @haszombiesinit.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, the memoir In the Dream House, and the story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and many others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia.
JOSH MALERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box, Malorie, and Unbury Carol. He’s also one of two singer-songwriters for the Detroit band the High Strung, whose song “The Luck You Got” can be heard as the theme song to the Showtime series Shameless. He lives in Michigan with the artist/musician Allison Laakko.
SEANAN MCGUIRE lives above a swamp in the Pacific Northwest, where the sunlight is very different (and often filtered through blackberry briars). She shares her home with four large cats, an axolotl, and a remarkably large assortment of books, dolls, and My Little Ponies. Seanan is the author of several dozen books across a variety of genres, under both her own name and the name “Mira Grant.” She spends most of her time writing, which makes perfect sense, given the rest of the situation. Find her on Twitter at @seananmcguire, or at www.seananmcguire.com.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the story collection Night-Gaunts. Her work has appeared in previous anthologies of Ellen Datlow’s, including The Doll Collection and Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales. She is a recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, the National Book Award, the PENAmerican Lifetime Achievement award, the President’s Medal of Honor, and the A.J. Liebling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing.
BENJAMIN PERCY’S most recent novel, The Ninth Metal, releases in June 2021 with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is the author of four other novels, three story collections, and a book of essays. He currently writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics.
Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, MARY RICKERT worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She is the winner of the Locus Award, Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. Her third short story collection, You Have Never Been Here, was published by Small Beer Press. Her novel, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, will be published by Undertow Press in the summer of 2021, and her novella, Lucky Girl, How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story will be published by Tor.com in the Fall of 2022.
PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of Survivor Song, Growing Things, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. She has written Catwoman for DC Comics. Her short stories have appeared in over a dozen Best of the Year anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.