Djibril al-Ayad is the nom de guerre of a historian, futurist, writer and editor of The Future Fire, magazine of social-political speculative fiction. His interests span science, religion and magic; education and public engagement; diversity, inclusivity and political awareness in the arts.
Aliette de Bodard is a half-French, half-Vietnamese who lives in a Parisian flat with more computers than warm bodies. When not busy working as a Computer Engineer, she writes speculative fiction: her Aztec noir trilogy Obsidian and Blood is published by Angry Robot, and her short fiction has been published in markets like Clarkesworld, Interzone and The Year's Best Science Fiction, garnering her a British Science Fiction Association Award, and Hugo and Nebula nominations. She blogs and geeks on food over at aliettedebodard.com.
Joyce Chng was born in Singapore but is a global citizen; she writes mainly science fiction (SFF) and YA fiction. Her stories can be found in The Apex Book of World SF II and Weird Noir. Her novels are published by Lyrical Press. Her website is A Wolf's Tale: awolfstale.wordpress.com.
Fabio Fernandes is an SF writer living in São Paulo, Brazil. He has several stories published in online venues like Everyday Weirdness, The Nautilus Engine, StarShipSofa, Semaphore Magazine, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, and Kaleidotrope Magazine, and in anthologies like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and The Apex World Book of SF, Vol. 2 (ed. by Lavie Tidhar). Two-time recipient of the Argos SF Award (Brazil), Fernandes co-edited with Jacques Barcia in 2008 the bilingual online magazine Terra Incognita, and has translated into Brazilian Portuguese several SF works, such as Neuromancer, Foundation, Snow Crash, Boneshaker, and The Steampunk Bible.
Ernest Hogan is descended from a curandero who once treated Pancho Villa. He is no relation to Ernest Hogan, the Father of Ragtime. Despite his Irish name (and ancestors) he is a born-in-East-L.A. Chicano. He coined the term “recomboculture”, and wrote the novels Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues. He’s all about impurity. You can read about it in his blog, mondoernesto.com, and his Chicanonautica column at labloga.blogspot.com.
Rahul Kanakia is a science-fiction writer who has sold stories to Clarkesworld, the Intergalactic Medicine Show, Apex, Nature, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He currently lives in Baltimore, where he is enrolled in the Master of the Fine Arts program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Stanford in 2008 with a B.A. in Economics and he used to work as an international development consultant. If you want to know more about him then please visit his blog at blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/rahkan.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a Filipino writer living in the Netherlands. A graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, she was the recipient of the Octavia Butler Scholarship in 2009. Her fiction has been published abroad as well as in her home country, the Philippines. Recent publication credits include Bloodchildren: Stories from the Octavia Butler Scholars, Weird Fiction Review, The Apex Book of World SF 2 and Philippine Genre Stories. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Future Fire, Weird Fiction Review and the Filipino publication, Our Own Voice. She is a regular columnist for Strange Horizons. Find her online at: rcloenenruiz.com.
Sandra McDonald’s first collection of fiction was a Booklist Editor’s Choice, an American Library Association Over the Rainbow Book and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Four of her stories have been noted by the James A. Tiptree Award Honor List for exploring gender stereotypes. She is the published author of several novels and more than sixty short stories for adults and teens, including the Fisher Key Adventures (written as Sam Cameron). She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine and teaches college in Florida.
Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity and inertial mass. They're also a doctoral student in sociology and a writer-like object who focuses primarily on various flavors of speculative fiction, usually with a decidedly queer bent, some of which has appeared in places like Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, and Apex Magazine. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. They spend most of their days using writing to distract from academics, except for the occasions when the two collide.
Carmen Moran grew up in East Germany, where the combined forces of her family and pre-reunification lack of TV introduced her to crafts and poetry from an early age. Following her move to Edinburgh, Scotland in 2000, she started taking life drawing and illustration classes, and was soon found making random attempts at world domination through the production of illustrations for various publications, and the creation of an army of Minimonsters. Since then, she has helped to set up Craft Reactor Edinburgh, and when she is not trying to scare small children, she can often be found at craft fairs, flogging the produce of Carmenland to the general public.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination, and lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. Her short stories have appeared in places such as The Book of Cthulhu and Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She has edited or co-edited the anthologies Fungi, Future Lovecraft and the upcoming Dead North. She owns and operates Innsmouth Free Press, a micro-press dedicated to the Weird and horrific. Her first collection, Shedding Her Own Skin, is out in 2013. She is working on a novel about a garbage collector who meets a drug-dealing vampire in Mexico City. Maybe it'll be publishable one day.
Gabriel Murray, contrary to the implications of his fiction, is in fact quite fond of cats. He is a graduate of the 2007 Clarion Writing Workshop and a member of the Outer Alliance. He reads submissions and reviews movies and books for Strange Horizons and has had work published or forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction and Ideomancer. He has studied, among other things, Victorian poetry, anti-intellectualism in mad scientist narratives, Latin, law, and vampire cinema, but prefers postcolonialism and bubble tea.
Shweta Narayan was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. She was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007. The clockwork bird showed up one day and hasn’t left yet; other stories about her have appeared in Shimmer’s Clockwork Jungle issue (reprinted in Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk), Realms of Fantasy, Clockwork Phoenix 3, and Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Shweta’s other fiction and poetry have recently appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, The Apex Book of World SF 2, and the 2012 Nebula Showcase Anthology.
Dinesh Rao, originally from India, trained as an ecologist and specializes in the behaviour of spiders. His short stories have appeared in the World SF Blog and the Indian Journal of Science Fiction Studies. He now lives in a small coffee town in Mexico with his wife and daughter. His blog is at pointsofdeparture.wordpress.com.
N.A. Ratnayake is a science teacher, writer, and stubborn idealist living in Boston. He is an aerospace engineer by training and an omnivorous reader. Though presently a New Englander, he was born and raised in the American West. The mountains, rains, coasts, and deserts of the West have been the backdrop for a rich interplay of conquest, struggle, identity, and hope—themes which often emerge in Ratnayake's stories. “Remembering Turinam” is his first professional publication. He tweets at twitter.com/quantumcowboy.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013). Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in several places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Stone Telling, and Goblin Fruit. She is Nonfiction and Poetry Editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and blogs at sofiasamatar.blogspot.com.
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Subterranean and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming, was released by Prime Books in December 2012. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew spends her free time on words, amateur photography, and the pursuit of colorful, unusual makeup. She has a love for cities, airports, and bees. Her fiction can be found in GigaNotoSaurus and Beneath Ceaseless Skies as well as the anthologies Clockwork Phoenix 4 and The End of the Road.
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama, of The Bookman Histories trilogy and many other works. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, and was nominated variously for BSFA, Campbell, Sturgeon and Sidewise awards. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and in South Africa but currently resides in London.
J.Y. Yang, born, raised and centred in Singapore, has been a scientist, a screenwriter, an editor, and a journalist at various times, but she almost always has been a teller of tales. Some of them have been published in places both local and international, including Crossed Genres and Ann Vandermeer's Steampunk Revolution. Last year she co-edited Ayam Curtain, an anthology of speculative micro-fiction written by Singapore-based authors. It was fun, but she isn't sure she'll do it again soon (for her sanity's sake).