CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the author of The City in the Middle of the Night, plus an upcoming young-adult trilogy. Her novel All the Birds in the Sky won the Nebula, Crawford, and Locus awards, and her short story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo. She’s also published a novella, Rock Manning Goes For Broke, and a story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. She was a founding editor of io9.com, and organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series.

DARRAN ANDERSON is the author of Imaginary Cities (University of Chicago Press) and the forthcoming Tidewrack (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He writes and gives talks on cities, architecture, and the future.

EMILY ASHER-PERRIN is the senior staff writer for Tor.com, and has been commenting on sci-fi and fantasy pop culture happenings in those wilds for the better part of a decade. You can find more odd Emily thoughts in collections like Queers Dig Time Lords, and around other hallowed corners of the Internet.

SYLAS K. BARRETT is a transgender actor, writer, and artist who has loved The Lord of the Rings since he was six years old. In addition to his theater work, he is a regular contributor on the Is It Transphobic podcast and runs the weekly column Reading the Wheel of Time for Tor.com.

JESSE BULLINGTON is the author of three weird historical novels: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, The Enterprise of Death, and The Folly of the World. Under the pen name Alex Marshall he recently completed the Crimson Empire trilogy; the first book, A Crown for Cold Silver, was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award.

SELENA CHAMBERS writes fiction and nonfiction from the swampy depths of North Florida. Her work has appeared in such publications as Literary Hub, Luna Luna, and Beautiful Bizarre, all with an emphasis on women creatives. She’s been nominated for several awards, including a Hugo and two World Fantasy awards. Her most recent books include the weird historical fiction collection Calls for Submission (Pelekinesis) and Mechanical Animals (Hex Publishing), co-edited with Jason Heller. Learn more at: www.selenachambers.com.

JOHN CHU is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Uncanny Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. among other venues. His translations have been published or are forthcoming in Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

MEG ELISON is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Her second novel was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick, and both were longlisted for the James A. Tiptree Award. She has been published in McSweeney’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time.

Bestselling author NEIL GAIMAN has long been one of the top writers in comics, and also writes books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living postmodern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama.

WILLIAM GIBSON’S first novel, Neuromancer, won the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards, and is considered a founding text of the cyberpunk genre. His many other books include Pattern Recognition (2003), The Peripheral (2014), and a collection of essays titled Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012). Gibson also coined the term “cyberspace,” and his 1980s depictions of virtual reality have proven both prescient and influential.

LEV GROSSMAN is the author of five novels, including the No. 1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy. A TV adaptation is now in its fourth season as the top-rated show on the Syfy Channel. The Bright Sword, Grossman’s reimagining of the epic of King Arthur, is slated for publication next year. Grossman is also an award-winning journalist who spent fifteen years as the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine.

GRADY HENDRIX is the author of Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism. His latest novel is We Sold Our Souls. He’s also the author of Paperbacks from Hell, the Stoker award-winning history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties.

JOHN JENNINGS is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award–winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. His current projects include the art collection Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent, the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), the supernatural crime noir story “Blue Hand Mojo,” and the Bram Stoker Award and Eisner Award–winning, New York Times bestselling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred.

DAVID BARR KIRTLEY is the host of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast on Wired.com. His short fiction has appeared in books such as New Voices in Science Fiction, The Living Dead, New Cthulhu, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year.

MATTHEW KRESSEL is an author & coder, three-time Nebula Award Finalist, World Fantasy Award Finalist, Eugie Award Finalist, author of King of Shards and many shorts, creator of the Moksha submissions system, co-host of Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series, and member of the Altered Fluid writing group. @mattkressel.

ROBERT LEVY is an author of stories and plays whose work has been seen Off-Broadway. A Harvard graduate subsequently trained as a forensic psychologist, his first novel, The Glittering World, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Shorter work has recently appeared in Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and The Best Horror of the Year, among others. He can be found at TheRobertLevy.com.

NICK MAMATAS is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and Hexen Sabbath, and dozens of short stories. His reviews and criticism have appeared in the Village Voice, The Smart Set, Germany’s Spex, and many other publications.

ANNALEE NEWITZ writes science fiction and nonfiction. She’s the author of several books, including Autonomous; and is the founding editor of io9.com

JEANNETTE NG is originally from Hong Kong but now lives in Durham, UK. She has an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, which spawned her love for writing gothic fantasy with a theological twist. She used to sell costumes out of her garage.

MARK OSHIRO is the Hugo-nominated writer of the online Mark Does Stuff universe (Mark Reads and Mark Watches), where he analyzes book and TV series. He was the nonfiction editor of Queers Destroy Science Fiction! and the coeditor of Speculative Fiction 2015 and is the president of the Con or Bust Board of Directors. When not writing/recording reviews or editing, Oshiro engages in social activism online and offline. Anger is a Gift is his debut YA contemporary fiction novel.

FRANK ROMERO has been playing RPGs since 1978, when he first played a wizard named Merlin (c’mon, I was seven!) using the Dungeons & Dragons White Box. He quickly moved on to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and he has carried a set of emergency dice with him everywhere since then. He is also an original founder of Denver Comic Con and runs an actual play Dungeon Crawl Classics podcast in association with Mutiny Information Cafe in Denver, Colorado that can be found at http://mutinytransmissions.libsyn.com/.

EKATERINA SEDIA wrote several novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron, as well as the short story collection Moscow But Dreaming. Her short stories appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She also edited several anthologies. She cowrote a script for Yamasong: March of the Hollows, a feature-length puppet fantasy film featuring Nathan Fillion, George Takei, Abigail Breslin, and Whoopi Goldberg.

NISI SHAWL wrote the Nebula Award finalist Everfair, an alternate history about a nineteenth-century Utopia in the Congo; and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award–winning story collection Filter House. Tor.com publishes her monthly “Expanded Course in the History of Black Science Fiction” column. She co-edited the anthologies Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; and Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.

Content creator STEPHEN SONNEVELD won the Kennedy Center Outstanding Playwright Award; writes, produces, and performs in “The Don’t Call Me Sweetheart! Show,” a scripted radio comedy program broadcasting out of Chicago; and writes comics and children’s books, such as the well-received Greye of Scotland Yard, and Pandora’s Lunchbox.

Hugo and Nebula finalist K. M. SZPARA is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore. His short fiction and essays appear in Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, and more; his debut novel, Docile, is coming from Tor.com Publishing in Spring 2020. Kellan has a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, which he totally uses at his day job as a paralegal. You can find him on the Internet at kmszpara.com and on Twitter at @kmszpara.

MOLLY TANZER is the author of Creatures of Will and Temper, Creatures of Want and Ruin, and the forthcoming Creatures of Charm and Hunger, well as the weird western Vermilion. For more information about her critically acclaimed novels and short fiction, sign up for her newsletter at mollytanzer.com, or follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram.

PAUL TREMBLAY is the award-winning author of seven novels, including The Cabin at the End of the World, A Head Full of Ghosts, and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, EntertainmentWeekly.com, and numerous “year’s best” anthologies.

GENEVIEVE VALENTINE is a Nebula-nominated novelist and comic book writer. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen year’s best collections; her nonfiction has appeared at the AV Club, NPR.org, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and others.

LASHAWN M. WANAK is a South Side Chicagoan living in Wisconsin with her husband and son. Her works have been published in Tor.com, Apex Magazine, and FIYAH, among others. She reviews books for Lightspeed magazine and is a 2011 graduate of Viable Paradise. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie.

PENNY A. WEISS is professor and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Saint Louis University. She is the author of numerous books, including Canon Fodder: Historical Women Political Thinkers and Conversations with Feminism: Political Theory and Practice. Her most recent work is Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader.

BRENNIN WEISWERDA received her MFA in directing for theatre and postbaccalaureate certificate in women’s studies from Western Illinois University. She is a feature writer for the Washington Capitals Website Russian Machine Never Breaks.

CHRISTIE YANT writes and edits science fiction and fantasy on the central coast of California, where she lives with a dancer, an editor, two dogs, three cats, and a very small manticore. Follow her on Twitter: @inkhaven