Beth Cato (1980-) is originally from Hanford, California, but currently lives and writes in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. She shares the household, to quote Cato herself, "with a hockey-loving husband, a numbers-obsessed son, and a cat the size of a canned ham."

Cato has written a large and impressive body of short fiction (over 60 stories) and poetry, which has been published in a number of magazines, including Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Mythic Delirum, Nature Magazine, and many others. Much of her short fiction was collected in Red Dust and Dancing Horses and Other Stories, published by Fairwood Press in 2017. She has been nominated for multiple Rhysling Awards, and her 2019 poem "After Her Brother Ripped the Heads from Her Paper Dolls" won the 2019 Rhysling for Short Poem. Additionally, her poem "he scores" was nominated for the 2021 Aurora Award for Best Poem/Song-English.

Cato's first novel, released in 2014, was The Clockwork Dagger, a rousing fantasy adventure with heavy elements of steampunk. The sequel, The Clockwork Crown, was released in 2015. Cato's novella Wings of Sorrow and Bone, set in her Clockwork Dagger universe, was nominated for a 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novella. Two additional stories, Final Flight and Deep Roots were released in 2016.

Her fantasy series Breath Of Earth, which is set in an alternate 1906 San Francisco, was released in fall 2016, and nominated for the 2017 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History. The novel has two sequels: Call of Fire, published in late 2017, and Roar of Sky in 2018. Cato's latest fantasy novel, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge is the first in a duology involving food-based magic and entitled Chefs of the Five Gods, and was released by 47North in June 2023.

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.