Ellen Datlow was born in New York City in 1949 and has enjoyed a long and storied career as a science fiction, horror and fantasy editor and anthologist. She was the fiction editor for Omni Magazine from 1981-1998 and edited Sci Fiction from 2000-2005. She has edited a large number of anthology series, including, among others, Blood, Fairy Tales Anthologies, Fairy Tales Retold, Mythic Fiction, Omni Science Fiction, The Best Horror of the Year, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. She has edited a great many single anthologies as well and has written numerous essays and reviews. Ellen Datlow won the 2002 and 2005 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor, as well as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2014. She has been nominated for many other professional awards as well.

A Minnesota born and Wisconsin raised man, Matthew Bey currently lives in Austin, TX where he is an editor for the print zine Space Squid as well as writes and edits other blogs, podcasts, and personal works.

Theodore Sturgeon is one of the legends of 20th-century science fiction. Born on Staten Island in New York City under the name of Edward Hamilton Waldo (his name was changed legally in 1930), Sturgeon produced over the course of some five decades an immense and important corpus of science fiction stories and novels.

Sturgeon's first professional work was the story "Ether Breather", which was published in September 1939 by Astounding Science Fiction. This was the first of several hundred stories that Sturgeon would produce over the course of his life, including such notable works as "Microcosmic God" (1941), "Baby Is Three" (1952, later expanded to become the novel More Than Human in 1953), "A Saucer of Loneliness" (1953), and "The World Well Lost" (1953). The last of these is famous as one of the first depictions of homosexuality in science fiction. Sturgeon was exceptionally well-regarded in his field, and at the height of his prolific career was the most anthologized English-language author in the world.

Sturgeon wrote only a few novels, most notably More Than Human in 1953, the tale of six people born with extraordinary abilities who eventually come together in shared consciousness. In addition, he also wrote screenplays for several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, including "Amok Time" and "Shore Leave".

Sturgeon was nominated for a number of literary honors during his lifetime. His novel More Than Human won the 1954 International Fantasy Award. His story " Slow Sculpture" received the 1971 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the 1971 Nebula for Best Novelette. In 1985 Sturgeon was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and he was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2000.

Theodore Sturgeon died in Eugene, Oregon, on May 8, 1985.

Johnnie Mae Hackworth was born on November 16, 1904 in Brenham, Texas. She was one of five children born to Victor and Gertrude Ralston Hackworth. Both her parents had deep roots in Texas history (a fact of which Johnnie Mae was very proud) - her mother's parents had, in fact, been members of Austin's Colony. Hackworth attended public schools in Brenham and later in Dallas.

In 1921, under what may have been forced circumstances (i.e. Hackworth was pregnant), Hackworth married Herschel A. Watson of Dallas. The couple produced two children, Herschel, Jr. (born 1922) and John Brooks (born 1924), but were divorced in 1926. The two boys would be Hackworth's only children.

Hackworth attended the Metropolitan Business College in Dallas, and worked for a time as a secretary for the Otis Elevator Company there. She moved to Austin, where she served as secretary to Texas House Speaker Fred Miner.  In 1935-1936 she was Calendar Clerk of the Texas House of Representatives, experience on which she later drew when running for political office. After failing in 1937 to retain her clerkship Hackworth moved to Washington DC and worked briefly as a secretary for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

In late 1937 Hackworth married Edwin A. Schaufler (1871-1957) of Witchita, Kansas, a railroad executive with the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway and later with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. In the 1940s the couple moved back to Hackworth's native Brenham, where they purchased the clubhouse and land of the Brenham Country Club which would be their home as well as Hackworth's base for her religious and political activities.

After her husband Edwin's death in 1957, she turned her attention towards two particular religious occupations. In Houston she established on Lyons Avenue the Church of America, which she later renamed the Globe Church. At her home in Brenham Hackworth established the American Bible College, an unaccredited institution formed to spread the word of Christ. The ABC experienced a number of name changes over the years, including the New Jerusalem Fellowship, the House of Prayer, the Children of God, the Children of Zion (Zion Colony), and Zion On The Hill. Some of these transformations seem to have been dictated by economic exigencies, while others may have been due to Hackworth's mercurial and unpredictable nature. [The Children of God title dates from Hackworth's connection with the "Children of God" Christian youth movement in the early 1970s. Hackworth's operation was part of a statewide network of places of refuge for wandering and disaffected youths. She provided free room and board to members of the sect (as many as 150 at a time, by some accounts), and also supplied liberal doses of her own peculiar brand of religious instruction.] Hackworth used her Brenham base as a site for printing many of her newsletters, press releases and other documents and messages.

Hackworth seems to have been mentally unstable. She considered herself a prophet, and later as the actual wife of God. She was known for writing long, rambling and repetitive religious screeds (many composed while in a trancelike state, according to her granddaughter) that combined mystic visions with End Times prophecy and more traditional biblical interpretations, with a large dollop of numerology. She was obsessed with the "true" meanings of names of political and other important figures, and also was deeply concerned with ferreting out and revealing the true identity of the 'Antichrist'. Included among the people that Hackworth considered the Antichrist or some other figure of great evil were Lyndon B. Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bernard Baruch, John Connally, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. She also believed that her hometown of Brenham was the site of the original Garden of Eden.

The reasons for Hackworth's mental condition are not clear. She may have had some family history of mental instability, or her condition may have been the result of syphilis, which Hackworth once claimed had been given to her by her first husband.

Hackworth, in fact, got into serious trouble over her erratic behavior. In September 1955 she was arrested by the U.S. Secret Service for making a threat against President Eisenhower, and for a time was confined to a mental institution in Austin. She was arrested again in April 1960 for again making threats and briefly returned to the mental hospital. In September 1964 she was arrested once more, this time for threatening President Johnson. She was temporarily jailed for the crime.

Hackworth intimately combined her religious views with her political opinions, which tended heavily towards the right-wing (including an end to the concept of separation of church and state). She formally entered the political arena in 1946, when she ran against Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1960 she ran as one of a number of candidates seeking to fill Johnson's senatorial seat (vacated by Johnson when he became Vice-President). In 1964 and again in 1966 Hackworth ran in the Democratic primary for Texas governor against John Connolly. In 1968, 1972, and 1976, she ran as a write-in candidate for President of the United States. In each election her fervent Christianity and, later, her identity as a prophet, played heavily into her campaigns.

Of course, Hackworth lost badly every time. However, her political 'career' provides the Hackworth Papers with numerous examples of her political beliefs, expressed in correspondence and campaign materials.

Johnnie Mae Hackworth died in Brenham, TX on April 13, 1980. Before her death, she had married once more, in 1958 to Gustav Adoph Eckman (died 1961?).

Edwin Henry Schaufler

Edwin H. Schaufler was born on January 7, 1871 on a farm in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. In 1883 he took a job as a message boy with the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad. He later had several jobs with the Kansas City, Southern and Northern Line, including motorman and conductor.  As General Manager with the KC Southern, he befriended railroad executive Arthur Stilwell (the namesake of Port Arthur, TX), and helped Stilwell to found the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway. Schaufler served as General Manager of that line, too, until it was acquired in 1928 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.

After acquistion, Schaufler became the assistant to the General Manager of the AT &SF's Western Line, until his retirement in 1942. He retired to Brenham with his wife Johnnie Mae Hackworth (whom he married in November 1937), and died in Houston on April 25, 1957.

Dr. Thomas D. Clareson was a noted scholar and critic of literary science fiction. He was born on August 26, 1926, in Austin, MN, and was a graduate of the University of Minnesota. Clareson received a M.A. from Indiana University in 1949 and his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. He was a professor of English at the College of Wooster (Wooster, OH) from 1955 until his retirement in May 1993. Clareson died in Wooster on July 6, 1993. In addition to science fiction, Clareson's academic specialities included 19th-century American literature and the English and American novel.

Clareson was the author of a number of notable works of academic criticism on science fiction, and champion of SF as a legitimate literary genre. He once said that "for years I've tried to show that science fiction is a form of American popular literature which has a long tradition and, as a kind of fantasy, has an importance equal to that of the realistic social novel."

Most famously, he wrote Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources(Greenwood Press: 1984), which became a standard reference work for the study of science fiction literature. Other major works of his include Some Kind Of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction(Greenwood Press: 1986), which won the Eaton Award from the University of California-Riverside; and Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926-1970 __(University of South Carolina Press: 1990). _Some Kind Of Paradise_is an important historical and thematic survey of science fiction that, like Science Fiction in America,  incorporates many plot synopses of different works.

Clareson's first work of SF criticism was the article "The Evolution of Science Fiction", published in _Science Fiction Quarterly_in August 1953. He went on to edit the journal Extrapolation(the oldest established academic journal relating to science fiction) from 1959-1989, as well as a number of different anthologies of SF criticism. In addition, Clareson was the general editor of Greenwood Press' microfilm reprint series of SF pulp magazines and its collection Early Science Fiction Novels: A Microfiche Collection.

Clareson was the chairman of the Modern Language Association's first seminar on science fiction in 1958, and from 1970-1976 was the first president of the Science Fiction Research Association. Since 1996, the SFRA has presented the yearly Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service in his honor. In 1977, Clareson received the Pilgrim Award from the SFRA for Lifetime Achievement in the field of science fiction scholarship.

John D. Clark (1907-1988) was a noted American chemist and science fiction writer and fan. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1934. From 1949 to 1970 he was the Chief Chemist at the Naval Air Rocket Test Station in Dover, New Jersey, which later became the Liquid Rocket Propulsion Laboratory of Picatinny Arsenal, where he developed liquid propellants. In 1972 he published a nonfiction work, Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants which included a preface by his friend, Isaac Asimov.

Clark was an active member of the early science fiction community. He published several stories in the 1930s with his friend L. Sprague de Camp and was friendly with other notable figures including L. Ron Hubbard and Fletcher Pratt. He became a fan of Robert E. Howard's fantasy stories in the 1930s. With P. Schuyler Miller, Clark worked out an outline of Conan's career as well as a map of his world, which he sent to Howard, who confirmed and corrected their findings, which were eventually published in the 1938 fanzine The Hyborian Age. Recognized as an early authority on Howard's work, Clark was invited to write introductions to the Gnome Press collections of his work in the 1950s. The Archive contains the materials relating to the publication and revisions of these items.

David H. Rosen was born on February 25, 1945, in Port Chester, NY to Max and Barbara Rosen. In 1966, he received his BA in an individual major in Psychological-Biological Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From there, he went on to medical school at the University of Missouri, where he earned his Medical Doctorate in 1970.

Following medical school, Rosen interned at the University of California in San Francisco from 1970 to 1971, after which he remained at UCSF at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute to do his residency from 1971 to 1974. In 1974, Dr. Rosen became the Chief Resident in Psychiatry and a Clinical Instructor at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, practicing general psychiatry and analytical psychotherapy. In 1975, Rosen became the Co-Director of the Shetland Health Study and Staff Psychiatrist of the Inpatient Treatment and Research Service at the Langley Porter Institute, UCSF. Dr. Rosen finished out his time at UCSF, as an Assistant Professor and Director of Psychiatric Aspects of Medical Practice in the Department of Psychiatry.

After leaving San Francisco, Rosen moved to Rochester, New York, where he was an Associate Professor and Associate Director in the Division of Behavioral Science in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine and Director of Consultation/Liaison Programs, Department of Psychiatry, at the University of Rochester, until coming to Texas A&M University in 1986.

Rosen became Professor of Psychiatry as well as the first McMillan Professor of Analytical Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M Health Science Center in College Station, TX until his retirement in 2011. In 1989, Dr. Rosen became a Professor of Humanities in Medicine at the Texas A&M Health Science Center.

David Rosen remains an active member and leader of the Jungian community, having served as general faculty at the Texas Region Jungian Training Seminar from 1992 to 2012. From 1997 to 2012, Dr. Rosen served as Senior Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and as faculty for the New Orleans Region Jungian Training Seminar from 1999 till 2006. He is also a member and Training Analyst of the Pacific Northwest Society of Jungian Analysts since 2011.

Dr. Rosen’s research interests include analytical psychology, the psychology of religion, positive psychology, depression, suicidology, social medicine and psychiatry, epidemiology, healing, creativity, and the psychosocial, psychiatric, and human aspects of medicine. His publications include over a hundred articles and chapters as well as ten books.

Rosen semi-retired in 2011 to Eugene, Oregon, where he is an active member of the psychiatric and medical community, serving as Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

Preston Morgan Bolton was a noted Houston architect whose career spanned from 1951-2011. The son of former University President Frank C. Bolton and his wife Lura, Bolton was born in College Station (on the campus of A&M, in fact) in 1920 and earned a degree from the Texas A&M College of Architecture in 1941. After graduating from Texas A&M, Preston joined the military and served in the European Theater during World War II.

At the end of the war, Bolton returned to Texas and settled in the Houston area in 1949. From 1951-1961 he directed an architectural firm in partnership with Willis Barnstone, leaving in 1962 to form a new firm, P.M. Bolton Associates.  The majority of Bolton's work was done in and around the Houston, TX area. His style, heavily influenced by the International Style, was modern and minimalistic with an emphasis on warm interiors flooded with light. Most of his projects showcase practicality alongside luxurious materials. Over the course of his career, Bolton received multiple rewards and honors from his work with the Association of Former Students and the Houston Chapter of American Institute of Architects.

Bolton was also an active civic leader in Houston. He was a co-founder of the Houston Ballet as well as an early president of the Board of Trustees for the Alley Theatre. He served as a board member and key patron for a number of Houston-area arts groups, and he and his wife Pauline (married 1960) were pillars of the local cultural community.

Preston and Pauline W. Bolton had four children: Dean, Teresa, Elizabeth, and Mary. He died in Houston on November 2, 2011.

Over a century ago, seventeen college alumnae from eight colleges met in Boston to discuss the needs of women college graduates, and the forming of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. The intent of this organization was to expand the range of professional opportunities available for female college graduates and to enable more women to pursue higher education in the future.

In 1882, one year after this original meeting, the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) was formed. It consisted of sixty-five graduates from eight different colleges and universities. By 1884, local branches were being added to the parent organization, and in 1889 a membership policy was codified which specified certain standards to be met by its members.

Since those early years, the organization, now called the American Association of University Women (AAUW), has become nationwide. In 1992, five years after extending their membership to male college graduates, the AAUW celebrated its 100th anniversary with over 140,000 members.

The AAUW has, however, achieved much more than just membership growth. Its services to higher education and the community, in general, have been great. Hospitality programs for foreign students, graduate fellowships for women scholars, educational legislation committees, adult education programs, and current issue workshops are a few of these outstanding accomplishments.

The Bryan-College Station Branch of the American Association of University Women originated in 1948 with seventy-one charter members under the leadership of Mrs. Omar Sperry. Since its inception, the branch has been actively involved in many civic improvement projects for the cities of Bryan and College Station, Tex. Among the activities which have highlighted their history are creating a Friends of the Public Library organization in 1955; beginning the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural Science in 1961; developing local daycare centers in the 1960s, and creating a coalition of organizations through a "women's conference" in 1978.

Gregory Benford was born January 30, 1941, in Mobile, AL. He earned college degrees through the Ph.D. in physics from 1960-1967. Benford is a practicing scientist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. Benford has been honored with the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Award, the Ditmar Award, and several others.

Otto Oscar Binder began writing science fiction with his brother Earl under the pen name Eando Binder and was first published in 1932. He kept the name Eando after Earl retired from writing in 1936. By 1935 they had produced 450,000 words, and by 1938, according to science fiction authority Sam Moskowitz, "Eando Binder had become one of the three most popular writers in the field." His popularity reached its height with his introduction of Adam Link, a very different robot conceptualization. Binder had a talent for plotting and was credited with being one of the more imaginative writers of the period. He largely left the science fiction field in the 1940s to write continuities for the Captain Marvel comic book series, which he did for 17 years. He made a brief and largely unsuccessful attempt to return to science fiction writing in the early 1950s. His last science fiction appearance was Mankind: Child of the Stars, with Max Hugh Flindt. Binder also wrote more than 300 nonfiction articles and wrote extensively on unidentified flying objects.

Otto Binder also wrote under the names John Coleridge, Dean D. O'Brien, Gordon A. Giles, Ione (or Ian) Frances Turek, and may have written under the house name Will Garth. He was an editor of two space magazines, Space World, and Jets and Rockets.

There are several sources available about Otto Binder, including:

• Clute, John. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (St. Martin's, 1993), p. 121-122.
• Reginald, R.. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, A Checklist 1700-1974, with Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1979. Volume 2, p. 817-818.
• Ash, Brian. The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: Harmony, 1977, pp. 133.
  Obituary, New York Times, October 19, 1974., p. 34

At the age of 24, Don Bosworth was enlisted as an apprentice seaman at the Navy Recruiting Station at Syracuse, New York on June 13, 1917. His service number was 112-59-73. From August 1917 to August 1920, Don Bosworth served as a seaman, second class, on the third U.S.S. Albany, the United States Navy protected cruiser. He was discharged in San Francisco as a quartermaster of the second class on August 26, 1920.

The third U.S.S. Albany, originally named Almirante Abreu, was constructed in Newcastle, England by Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., for the Brazilian Government in 1879. She was purchased in 1898 by the United States. As the third U.S.S. Albany, she was launched in 1899 under the sponsorship of Mrs. John C. Colwell, the wife of the American naval attache in London.

In 1919, she joined the Asiatic Fleet. At that time, the Russian Civil War against Bolsheviks continued. The United States sent troops to Vladivostok, one of the ports where the Allied supplies had been stockpiled. The Albany stayed in Vladivostok until early 1920, protecting American troops on shore and evacuating sick and wounded men. She was decommissioned in 1922.

The Albany had a displacement of 3,340 tons, a length of 354 feet, 9.5 inches, and a beam of 43 feet, 9 inches. She was rated at 20.52 knots and was armed with six 6-inch guns, four 4.7-inch guns, ten 6-pounders, four 1-pounders, four machine guns, two field pieces, and three torpedo tubes.

Bibliography
Mooney, James L. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. vol. 1. 1959.
Mooney, James L. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. vol. 1. 1991.
War Service Records provided by New York State Archives.

Austin E. Burgess became the editor of the student-run newspaper, The Battalion, and wrote the first printed history of Texas A&M, published in 1915.

William Richard Cavitt was born on July 4, 1849, in Wheelock Texas to Josephus Cavitt (1828-1883) and Cather Ann (Dunn) Cavitt (1826-1905).
William graduated from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee with distinguished honors in both Literary and Law Departments. On February 4, 1874, he moved to Bryan Texas where he opened a law practice and was the Brazos County Attorney from November 1878 to November 1880 with reelection in 1882 until 1884. In 1884, William was elected Representative for the Texas State Legislature, where he served two terms, after being nominated by a Democratic Convention of the fiftieth district for the Legislature.
In 1883, he was appointed to the Board of Directors for A&M College by Governor Lawrence S. Ross and served on the board until 1896.

Cavitt married Mary Mithcell (1854-1914), who was the niece of Colonel Harvey Mitchell (referred to as the "Father of Brazos County"), and together they had six children.

Patricia Nead Elrod (1951-) is an editor and a writer, who has written over twenty-five novels in the urban fantasy genre, most of them involving vampires. Her series include Jonathan Barrett, Gentleman Vampire (4 books, 1993-1996); The Vampire Files (20 books, 1990-2010); and, with Nigel Bennett, Richard Dun (3 books, 1997-2004). She has also written numerous short stories, and co-authored (with Roxanne Conrad) the nonfiction work Stepping Through the Stargate: Science, Archaeology and the Military in Stargate.

Dr. Charles L. Boyd was born October 8, 1921, and died on October 4, 2017.

World Fantasy Award-nominated Elsa Sjunneson defines herself as "a partially deafblind bicoastal raised speculative fiction writer and editor. " Originally from Seattle, WA., she is a graduate of both Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA and Sarah Lawrence College (in the Women's History program) in New York. She has written short stories for venues including Fireside and Uncanny Magazine; she co-edited the September/October 2018 special issue of Uncanny (titled Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction). This issue, designed to restore the disability experience to the science fiction narrative, won Sjunneson the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, the 2019 Aurora Award for Best Related Work-English, and the 2019 British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical.

She has also been the Assistant Editor and Managing Editor of Fireside Quarterly and Uncanny's non-fiction editor. She has also been part of the creative team behind Serial Box’s Marvel's Jessica Jones: Playing with Fire,and has worked on game design products such as Changeling, Wraith, The Fate Accessibility Toolkit, and Dead Scare. Her comic story about Peggy Carter will be featured in 2021's Women of Marvel giant-size comic book.

Sjunneson, who won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, is also a noted writer of non-fiction pieces, which have appeared in venues such as Tor.com, the Boston Globe, and Uncanny. She is a fierce activist for the disabled and for correcting the media misrepresentation of disabled people. Her first full-length work, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism was released in October 2021.

She founded and wrote the popular blog Feminist Sonar from 2011-2016, where she laid groundwork for many discussions on disability in popular discourse. As an activist for disability rights, she has worked with New Jersey 11th for Change and the New York Disability Pride Parade.

Robert Skinner was born in Alexandria, VA in 1948. He has degrees in history (B.A., Old Dominion University, 1970) and library science (M.L.S., Indiana University, 1977) and studied creative writing at the University of New Orleans from 1990-1992. He authored or co-authored four different books dealing with the career of African-American novelist Chester Himes (a mutual love of Himes brought Skinner together in friendship with Bill Crider) , and six novels set in Depression-era New Orleans. Those hard-boiled crime novels feature Wesley Farell, a gambler and bon-vivant who is also an African-American man passing as white. They were published between 1998-2002.

Skinner's stories have appeared in Xavier Review, War, Literature & the Arts, Louisiana Literature, STORYGLOSSIA, and PlotsWithGuns.com. He is a regular contributor to FIRSTS: The Book Collector's Magazine, for which he has written essays on Elmore Leonard, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Benjamin Capps, Bernard Cornwell, and Robert Morgan, to name a few.

In 2013 he retired as University Librarian at Xavier University of Louisiana after 26 years in service there.

Howard Waldrop was born in Houston, Mississippi on September 15, 1946, and moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas in 1950. He attended the University of Texas at Arlington, spent two years in the Army, and lived briefly in Grand Prairie and Bryan before moving to Austin in 1974 where he was been a member of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop along with Bruce Sterling, Leigh Kennedy, Chad Oliver, Lewis Shiner, and others.

Waldrop spent most of his life in Texas, especially in the Austin area. A prolific and singular writer, he was once described by George R. R. Martin as "the most startling, original, and entertaining short story writer in science fiction today."

He sold his first story to Analog, entitled "Lunchbox", in 1972, and was subsequently widely published in places as diverse as Omni, Playboy, Universe, Crawdaddy, New Dimensions, Shayol, Orbit, and Zoo World. His first novel, The Texas Israeli War: 1999, written in collaboration with fellow Texan Jake Saunders, was published in 1974. In 1984 his solo novel, Them Bones, was published as part of the new Ace Specials line. But it was as a short story writer that Waldrop made his reputation. Many of his unique and bizarre stories have been published in different collections, including Howard Who? (1986), All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past (1987), Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations (2003), and H'ard Starts: The Early Waldrop (2023). A particularly notable collection of his stories, Night of the Cooters (the title story was a 1988 Hugo nominee, and was adapted into an animated short in 2022), was published in 1990.

His 1980 story "The Ugly Chickens" won both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards in 1981, and Waldrop has also been frequently nominated over the years for many other awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, the Balrog, and the Sidewise Awards. In the course of his long career, Waldrop wrote over two hundred stories, with his most recent one (not including those appearing only in a collection) being "Til the Cows Come Home To Roost", in the Spring 2018 issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2021.

Waldrop died from a stroke in Austin, on January 14, 2024, at the age of 77.

Jessica Wynne Reisman was born in Philadelphia, PA, but has also lived in Florida, Southern California, and Maine, before moving to Austin, TX. She was graduated from the University of Texas-Austin with an M.A. in 1992. Reisman began publishing stories professionally in 1998, with "Rain Brujah", published in the anthology Horrors! 365 Scary Stories: Get Your Daily Dose of Terror (1998). She has been published in a number of venues, including Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative, Sci Fiction, Interzone, The Red Penny Papers, and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Her story "Bourbon, Sugar, Grace" was published as an e-chapbook by Tor in 2017.

Reisman's stories have also appeared (or been republished) in many anthologies, including Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E.Howard (2006), Otherwordly Maine (2008), Passing for Human (2009), Rayguns Over Texas (2013), and Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People (2022). Many of her stories were collected in the 2019 collection The Arcana of Maps and Other Stories, from Fairwood Press. In addition to this body of work, Reisman has written two novels: the first was The Z Radiant (2004), set on a planet that can only be accessed periodically through wormholes and thus produces a cargo cult mentality among the inhabitants. In 2017 Reisman published the far future space opera Substrate Phantoms, a troubling and expansive story of potential first contact aboard a distant space station and the dangers and psychological effects it produces. The novel received glowing reviews.

After a long residence in the Austin area, where she was a prominent member of the local writing and con scene, Reisman moved in late 2023 back to Southern California, where she currently resides.

Martha Wells, novelist ans short story writer, was born on September 1,1964 in Fort Worth, Texas, and graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.A. in Anthropology. She currently resides in College Station, Texas.

Her first novel, The Element of Fire, was published by Tor in hardcover in July 1993 and was a finalist for the 1993 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award and a runner-up for the 1994 Crawford Award. (The French edition, Le feu primordial, was a 2003 Imaginales Award nominee. Her second novel for Tor, City of Bones, was a 1995 hardcover and June 1996 paperback release. Both novels were on the Locus recommended reading lists. Her third novel The Death of the Necromancer (Avon Eos) was a 1998 Nebula Award Nominee and the French edition was a 2002 Imaginales Award nominee. Wheel of the Infinite (HarperCollins Eos) followed in 2000. In 2003 Wells published The Wizard Hunters (HarperCollins Eos/May 2003), the first book in a fantasy trilogy taking place in the world of Ile-Rien (from The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer). It was followed by two sequels - The Ships of Air (2004) and The Gate of Gods (2005). Wells' books have been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, and Dutch.

Wells has also written an number of other books, including a fantasy series for young adults that includes the novels Emilie and the Hollow World (2013) and Emilie and the Sky World (2014); two tie-in novels set in the universe of television's Stargate Atlantis - Reliquary (2006), and Entanglement (2007); and the novel Empire and Rebellion: Razor's Edge (2013). This last is set in the Star Wars: Legends universe and is notable for placing Princess Leia Organa front and center as the main heroine.

Among Wells' most notable works are the five novels and numerous stories comprising the fantasy series The Books of the Raksura. The series, which began with the 2011 novel The Cloud Roads, takes place in the lush and varied Three Worlds, and is centered around Moon, a member of the shapeshifting Raksura species. Popular and critically-acclaimed, the series was nominated in 2018 for the Hugo Award for Best Series. The series ended in 2017 with the novel The Harbors of the Sun.

In 2017, Wells embarked on a new project, The Murderbot Diaries, an science fiction series about a self-aware cyborg who must reckon with its newfound autonomy as well as its ongoing frustration with the mass of humanity among which it lives and works. The first novella in the series, All Systems Red was nominated for the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award and the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella. It won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella, making Wells the first graduate of TAMU to win a Nebula Award. All Systems Red has also won the 2018 Locus Award for Best Novella and a 2018 ALA/YALSA Alex Award. The second book in the series, Artificial Condition, was released in May 2018 and won the 2019 Hugo award for Best Novella (another first for Wells, as the first Aggie to win a Hugo Award as an author). Subsequent entries in the series include Rogue Protocol (2018), Exit Strategy (2018), Network Effect (2020, the first novel in the series and winner of the 2020 Locus Award for Best SF Novel, the 2021 Nebula award for Best Novel, and the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel), and most recently, the novella Fugitive Telemetry (2021). The series has been a critical and popular hit, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2021 and the first book is being produced by Apple TV+ as a television series set for broadcast in late 2024. The latest installment of the series, the novel System Collapse, was released in November 2023.

Wells' new epic fantasy novel, Witch King, was published by Tordotcom in May 2023. It has been nominated for the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Edward W. (Winslow) Bryant, Jr. was born on August 27, 1945, in White Plains, New York, but was raised in Wyoming, where he received his MA in English (University of Wyoming, 1968). He attended the famed Clarion Writer's Workshop in 1968, and in 1972 moved to Denver, Colorado, where he founded the Northern Colorado Writer's Workshop, and where he spent the remainder of his life. The NCWW counted among its alumni such acclaimed authors as Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, Wil McCarthy, Bruce Holland Rogers, Dan Simmons, and Connie Willis. Bryant also helped found and run many other workshops and classes as well, including the Colorado Springs Writers Workshop.

Bryant was an accomplished SF writer, working primarily in short fiction. His first published stories, released in early 1970, were “They Come Only in Dreams” and “Sending the Very Best”. Over the succeeding decades he wrote more than 100 short stories, notably including the Nebula Award-nominated works "Shark" (1973), "Particle Theory" (1977), "The Hibakusha Gallery" (1977), "Strata" (1980), and "The Thermals of August" (1981). He won the Nebula Award for "Stone" (1978) and "gIANTS" (1979), both of which were also Hugo Award finalists. Other stories of note include World Fantasy- and Stoker Award finalist “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned” (1989), Stoker nominee “The Loneliest Number” (1990), and Sturgeon Memorial Award nominee “The Fire that Scours” (1994). Many of Bryant's stories were published in collections including Among the Dead and Other Events Leading up to the Apocalypse (1973), Cinnabar (1976), a collection of linked far-future stories, Wyoming Sun (1980), Particle Theory (1981), Neon Twilight (1990), Darker Passions (1991), The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age (2001), Trilobyte (2014), and Predators and Other Stories (2014).

In 1975 Bryant published his single novel Phoenix Without Ashes, co-written with Harlan Ellison. He also wrote several chapbooks between 1990-1993, and contributed stories to his friend George R.R. Martin's "Wild Cards" universe in the anthologies Wild Cards (1987), Jokers Wild (1987), Aces Abroad (1988), Down and Dirty (1988), and Dealer's Choice (1992).

Bryant was an active critic during his career, as well as a Toastmaster and/or Chair for various important genre conventions, including Devention II, the World Fantasy Convention, ArmadilloCon, and the World Horror Convention. In 1996, the International Horror Guild presented Bryant with its Living Legends Award.

Edward Bryant died at his home in Denver on February 10, 2017.

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