Django Wexler was born in New York on January 13, 1981. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in computer science and creative writing, and before embarking on a full-time writing career conducted research on artificial intelligence for Carnegie Mellon and was a programmer for Microsoft in Seattle. Wexler's first novel, Memories of Empire, was published in 2005. His second, Shinigami, God of Death, was released the next year.

2013 saw the publication of the first in Wexler's noted The Shadow Campaignsseries, The Thousand Names. The Shadow Campaigns novels are early and prominent examples of the literary subgenre that has become known as 'flintlock fantasy' or 'gunpowder fantasy', that is, fantasy narratives that do not inhabit the traditional sword-and-sorcery medieval European analogues but instead are set in worlds more culturally and technologically reminiscent of 18th and early 19th-century Europe and America. In this subgenre, alongside the gods, magic and unworldly creatures of traditional fantasy stand early modern technologies such as cannons and flintlock rifles. The Shadow Campaigns follows the adventures of several individuals (many of them soldiers) living in the Vordanai Empire, a rough fantasy analog to the 18th-century British Empire. There are five novels in the series, including The Thousand Names, The Shadow Throne, The Price of Valor, and The Guns of Empire, as well as several short stories. The final volume, The Infernal Battalion, was released in 2018.

In 2014, Wexler released the first of a fantasy series for young adults, The Forbidden Library .The novel and its three sequels tell the story of young Alice, who lives with her uncle Geryon and discovers her ability to enter into the magical realms contained within books in her uncle's massive and mysterious library. Wexler also wrote another well-received YA fantasy series between 2019-2021: the Wells of Sorcery trilogy, a saga of mysterious warriors, ghost ships, and travels to strange new worlds. His latest book is the epic science-fantasy Ashes of the Sun, published by Orbit in 2020.

Wexler has also published a number of works of short fiction, including the story "The End of the War", which achieved 2nd place in the 2016 Asimov's Readers Poll for Best Novelette; the Star Wars story "Amara Kel's Rules for TIE Pilot Survival (Probably)"; and the 2021 Tor.com novella Hard Reboot.

Wexler currently resides in Washington State.

Elgin Award-winning author Holly Lyn Walrath (called "Houston's premier horror poet" by the Houston Press) was born and raised in a Baptist household in Garland, Texas. She graduated in 2007 from the University of Texas - Austin with a B.A. in English, and received a Master of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing degree from the University of Denver in 2015. That same year saw the first publication of her works, including the story "The Last Man on Earth" in the online flash fiction journal Grievous Earth and the poem "A Red Sky" in the online Vine Leaves Literary Journal. Since then, Walrath has published a large number of short stories, pieces of flash fiction, and poems.

Walrath published her first collection of poetry, Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press), in 2018. As A.J, Odasso, the senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons noted, “Glimmerglass Girl delights and chills the senses in equal measure, deceptively minute in its scope. Walrath challenges preconceived notions of feminine identity in these delicate, uncanny poems—and spares nobody, no body, in the process.” The collection won the 2019 Elgin Award for Best Chapbook from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She had a collection published in Italian in 2020, Numinose Lapidi (Kipple Press), which was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. The English translation of that collection - of horror poems written in the pantoum form - was published in April 2023 by Aqueduct Press as Numinous Stones. Walrath's most recent collection was The Smallest of Bones, released in 2021 by Clash Books and a 2021 Elgin Award nominee. The collection explores "a wide range of topics such as love, romance, relationships, queer sexuality, religion, death, demons, ghosts, bones, gender, and darkness."

Walrath's science fiction-, fantasy-, and horror-related work has appeared in many different venues, including 365 Tomorrows, Luna Station Quarterly, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Sunday Morning Transport, Abyss & Apex, Dreams & Nightmares, StarLine, and Eye of the Telescope* (an issue of which Walrath guest-edited in 2018), among many others. Her 2020 poem "Yes, Antimatter Is Real" was nominated for the 2021 Dwarf Stars Award from the SFPA, and she has had numerous poems nominated for the SFPA's Rhysling Award.

Walrath is also an editor - in 2019 she launched Interstellar Flight Press, an indie speculative fiction publishing company focusing on underrepresented genres and authors. She has edited 9 books for IFP as of 2022, including several that have won major industry awards.

After residing in Colorado for 8 years, and Austin for nearly 19 years, Walrath moved to and currently resides in Houston, TX.

Lisa Tuttle was born in Houston, TX on September 16, 1952. She was active from an early age in science fiction fandom (she founded and edited the Houston Science Fiction Society's fanzine Mathom while still in high school, and much of her early writing appeared in various fanzines), as well as writing. Tuttle graduated from Syracuse University in 1974 with a BA in English Literature, after which she moved to Austin and became an active member of the Texas science fiction community as well as a journalist for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.

Tuttle published her first professional short story, "Stranger In The House", in the 1972 Clarion II anthology. In 1973 she helped found the Turkey City Writer's Workshop in Austin, together with Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley, and Tom Reamy. The workshop has graduated a number of important writers, including Bruce Sterling, Ted Chiang, Cory Doctorow, George R.R. Martin, Steven Gould, Maureen McHugh, Lewis Shiner, Martha Wells, and Connie Willis.  In 1974 Tuttle was awarded the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (shared with Spider Robinson).

Tuttle has been writing continuously over the succeeding decades. In 1975 she co-wrote with George R.R. Martin the novella "The Storms of Windhaven", which won the 1976 _Locus_Award for Best Novella and was expanded into the 1981 novel WindhavenTuttle's first). Her other novels include, among others, Lost Futures (1992, nominated for the 1992 BSFA Award for Best Novel, the 1992 James Tiptree Award, and the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel), The Pillow Friend(1996, nominated for the 1996 Tiptree Award and the 1996 International Horror Guild Award), The Mysteries (2005), and The Silver Bough(2006). She has written a large number of acclaimed short stories and novellas, including, among others, "Stone Circle" (1976, nominated for the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novella), "One-Wing" (1980, co-written with Martin and winner of the 1980 _Analog_Award for Best Serial Novel/Novella), "In Translation" (1989, winner of the 1989 BSFA for Best Short Fiction), "And The Poor Get Children" (1995), and "My Death: (2004, nominated for the 2004 International Horror Guild Award for Best Long Form, the 2005 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, and the 2005 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella).

Tuttle made history in 1982 for being the first, and to date only, writer to refuse a Nebula Award. Her short story "The Bone Flute" was awarded the Nebula for Best Short Story, but Tuttle had already withdrawn it from competition in protest of another nominee having actively campaigned for the award.

She has also written YA fiction, including Catwitch(with illustrator Una Woodruff) (1983), Panther in Argyll(1996) and Love-on-Line (1998). Tuttle has written under different pseudonyms for a number of books. In 1987 she wrote the novel Megan's Story under the name Laura Waring, and Virgo: Snake Inside for a series of twelve young-adult books called Horrorscopes(1995) under the house pseudonym of Maria Palmer. She was a contributing author to Ben M. Baglio's 2000-2002 YA series Dolphin Diaries.

Tuttle has also written non-fiction, including the Encyclopedia of Feminism(1986) and Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction(2002). As editor she has compiled several anthologies, including Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women(1990), and Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity(1998) .Her work, both fiction and non-fiction, is known for her focus on strong female characters and on gender issues.

Lisa Tuttle was married from 1981-1987 to fellow SF writer Christopher Priest, and is now married to Colin Murray. The two reside in Scotland. Her recent published works include the "Jesperson and Lane" paranormal mystery series, with The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief (2016) , its 2017 sequel The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross, and the latest book in the series, The Curious Affair of the Missing Mummies (2023); and the 2021 Stoker-nominated collection The Dead Hours of Night. Her most recent published collection of stories was Riding The Nightmare, published by Valancourt Books in June 2023.

Patrice Sarath is an author and editor based in Austin, Texas. Her acclaimed novels include the fantasy duology The Sisters Mederos and Fog Season (Books I and II of the Tales of Port Saint Frey, 2018-2019), the 2008-2012 fantasy series Books of the Gordath (Gordath Wood, Red Gold Bridge, and The Crow God’s Girl) and the romance/Jane Austen pastiche The Unexpected Miss Bennet* (2011).

Sarath is the author of numerous short stories that have appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Weird Tales, Black Gate, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and many others. Her short story “A Prayer for Captain La Hire” was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy of 2003, compiled by David Hartwell and Katherine Cramer. Her story “Pigs and Feaches,” originally published in Apex Digest, was reprinted in 2013 in Best Tales of the Apocalypse by Permuted Press. Her most recent works of short fiction include the science fiction story "Joe Fledge's Jump" (2021) and Petrichor and Ozone (2022).

Sarath is an avid horsewoman, and her equestrian experience is woven throughout the Gordath series. She is an active member of the Texas science fiction and fantasy literary community as well as the regional con scene. Information about Sarath can be found at her website, at https://www.patricesarath.com/.

Kelly Ann Robson (1967-) was first inspired to write science fiction in 1983 when, as a young girl she picked up a copy of Asimov's Science Fiction with a story by Connie Willis. She attended the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where, in January 1988, she first met her future wife and fellow author Alyx Dellamonica. The two were married in 2003 and live in Toronto.

Robson graduated from the University of Alberta with a B.A. in English in 1991. She obtained a Certificate in Multimedia Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2001. Upon graduation from the U of Alberta, Robson held several different jobs, including being a writer, editor, graphic artist, and web designer for ESSA Technologies, a Vancouver-based ecological sciences consulting firm. From 2008-2012 she was a freelance columnist and wine authority for the women's magazine Chatelaine.

In 2015 Robson published a flurry of work, beginning with the short story "The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill" in the February 2015 issue of Clarkesworld. The story is a disturbing commentary on the ongoing epidemic of violence and murder against women along Highway 16 in Alberta and British Columbia. It was included in the Night Shade Press anthology In The Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post 9/11 World, and was nominated for the 2016 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Released by Tor.com in June 2015 was Robson's novella Water of Versailles, an historical fantasy set in 1738 at the French court of Louis XV. It was nominated for a 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novella, and won the 2016 Prix Aurora for Best English Short Fiction. In the August 2015 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, Robson published the bleak dystopian tale "Two-Year Man", bringing her creative journey that began when she first discovered Asimov's in 1983, full circle. In 2021, Subterranean Press published a collection of Robson's short fiction, entitled Alias Space and Other Stories, which won the 2022 Aurora Award for Best Related Work-English. Among her most recent work is the story "In a Cabin, In a Wood", published in Jonathan Strahan's 2023 anthology The Book of Witches.

Her well-received time travel novella Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach was published by Tor.com in March 2018, was nominated for the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and won the 2019 Prix Aurora for Best Short Fiction - English. Her 2017 story "We Who Live In The Heart" was nominated for the 2018 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Robson's most recent published work is the novella High Times in the Low Parliament, released by Tor.com in August 2022 and a nominee for both the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2023 Locus Poll Award for Best Novella.

In addition to her science fiction work, Robson has also published a noir story, "Good For Grapes", which was included in the anthology The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir (March 2015). Her James Bond story "The Gladiator Lie" was published in the anthology Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond (ChiZine, November 2015). Robson's horror novella "A Human Stain" was released as a Tor.com original in January 2017, and won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Robson was nominated for the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

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.

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian who grew up in Annapolis, MD. She attended Simon's Rock College of Bard from 1997-1999, and then transferred to Bryn Mawr, where she graduated in 2001. She obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2009. From 2009-2014 Palmer was an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University, specializing in the history of the Renaissance. In 2014 Palmer became an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago. She published her first monograph, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, based on her dissertation, in 2014. She teaches on European intellectual history, the Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment periods in Europe, and the history of science and technology, among other topics.

Palmer is very active in the science fiction fan and filker communities. She is an authority on manga and anime and has staffed a number of anime conventions, with special attention paid to cosplay events. In addition, she composes and performs her own music (mostly a capella) that generally incorporates folk and Renaissance styles. She is a member of the a cappella filk group Sassafras, and as part of that group has composed a song cycle based on Norse mythology and the history of medieval Iceland in which the myths took their most well-known written form, entitled Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok.

In addition to this, Palmer is also a science fiction novelist. Her first series, Terra Ignota, had the first book, Too Like The Lightning, released in May 2016. Set in Earth's far future, the series is written in the style of 18th-century philosophical fiction. It received the 2017 Compton Crook Award and was nominated in 2017 for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The sequel, Seven Surrenders, was released in early 2017, and the third volume in the series, The Will To Battle later that year. The final volume in the series, Perhaps The Stars was released in late 2021.

Palmer won the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (1981-) was born and raised in Mexico. Since 2008, she has written some 40-odd short stories, many of which have been collected in the anthologies This Strange Way of Dying (2013, a finalist for the 2014 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic), and Love and Other Poisons (2014). In addition, she has edited or co-edited a number of genre anthologies, including, among others, Future Lovecraft (2011, with Paula R. Stiles), Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction (2013), Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse (2014), and She Walks In Shadows (2015, with Paula R. Stiles, winner of the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology).

She has written several novels: her debut, the Mexico City-set fantasy Signal to Noise (2015), was nominated for the 2016 Aurora Novel for Best Novel (in English), the 2016 Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the 2016 Sunburst Award. It won the 2016 Copper Cylinder Award. Her second book, the vampire novel Certain Dark Things was released in 2016. The Beautiful Ones, was published in 2017, the year in which she also published a science fiction novella, Prime Meridian.

Moreno-Garcia's 2019 fantasy novel Gods of Jade and Shadow, based in the legends and myths of Mesoamerica, received critical and popular acclaim (including a nomination for the 2010 Nebula Award), and it won the 2020 Sunburst Award. Her latest genre novel, Mexican Gothic, is a critically-acclaimed horror novel that has been picked up by Hulu for a limited TV series. 2020 also saw the publication of Moreno-Garcia's first nongenre novel, the thriller Untamed Shore, set in 1970s Mexico. Another noir thriller set in Mexico, Velvet Was The Night, was published in August 2021. She published a Mexican reworking of H.G. Wells, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, in July 2022, and in July 2023 released her latest novel, Silver Nitrate, a dark occult thriller based heavily in Mexican horror movies.

Moreno-Garcia is the publisher of the small press Innsmouth Free Press, and co-edits the Jewish Mexican Literary Review with Lavie Tidhar. She also co-edits The Dark Magazine.

Moreno-Garcia has an MA in Science and Technology Studies from the University of British Columbia; her thesis was entitled "Magna Mater: Women and Eugenic Thought in H.P. Lovecraft". She currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Stephen Leigh (who writes as Leigh and under the names S.L. Farrell and Matthew Farrell) was born in Cincinnati, OH, on February 27, 1951. With a B.A. in Fine Arts and an M.A. in Creative Writing, Leigh taught creative writing at Northern Kentucky University from 2001 until his retirement in 2020.

Leigh's literary debut was the short story "And Speak of Soft Defiance", published in Eternity SF in 1975; this was the first of some 40 pieces of short fiction Leigh has written. Some of Leigh's short fiction include his December 1976 story "Answer in Cold Stone" (Leigh's first Analog publication), "When We Come Down" (Asimov's, 1978), "Shaping Memory" (Asimov's, 1985), "Evening Shadow" (Asimov's, 1988), "The Bright Seas of Venus (Galaxy's Edge*, 2013), and "Bones of Air, Bones of Stone" (2015).

In addition, Leigh has written numerous stories as an original member of George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards mosaic universe collective of writers. Leigh is responsible for the creation of several notable Wild Cards characters, including Gregg Hartmann/Puppetman, Bloat, Oddity, Gimli, and Steam Wilbur. To date, Leigh (sometimes writing as S.L. Farrell) has written content for eighteen of the Wild Cards books.

Leigh has also enjoyed a successful career as a science fiction and fantasy novelist. His debut novel was 1981's Slow Fall To Dawn, which was nominated for the 1982 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Slow Fall was the first of Leigh's Neweden/Hoorka trilogy, followed by Dance of the Hag (1983) and A Quiet of Stone (1984). He wrote The Secret of the Lona in 1988, the first in the Dr. Bones series (a fantasy series written by various authors, including Leigh's Wild Cards colleague William Wu). Leigh has written 6 novels in AvoNova's Ray Bradbury Presents series (1992-1995): Dinosaur World, Dinosaur Planet, Dinosaur Samurai, Dinosaur Warriors, Dinosaur Empire, and Dinosaur Conquest. His 1998-1999 Mictlan duology includes the novels Dark Water's Embrace and Speaking Stories,

Leigh has also written several popular fantasy series. most of them under the name S.L. Farrell. These include the Cloudmages series (2003-2005), which include Holder of Lightning, Mage of Clouds, and Heir of Stone; the Nessantico Cycle (2008-2010), which includes the novels A Magic of Twilight, A Magic of Nightfall, and A Magic of Dawn; the paranormal fantasy series Sunpath Cycle (2017-2018), which includes A Fading Sun and A Rising Moon. Leigh's standalone SF&F novels include The Bones of God (1981), The Crystal Memory (1987), The Abraxas Marvel Circus (1990), Thunder Rift (2001, as Matthew Farrell, republished in 2010 as The Shape of Silence), and several others. His most recent published novel is 2021's science fiction work Amid the Crown of Stars.

Jeffe (Jennifer Mize) Kennedy (August 22, 1966) is a noted and notable writer of fantasy and erotic romance. An author of novels, short stories, poetry, and non-fiction, Kennedy has been writing steadily for many years. Her first book was a book of non-fiction essays, Wyoming Trucks, True Love, and The Weather Channel (2004), describing her family, her upbringing, and her life in Wyoming. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.

Her first published work of fiction was the 2010 novel Petals & Thorns, an erotic reworking of the Beauty & The Beast story originally published under the pen name "Jennifer Paris". Since then she has written a number of fantasy romance series, including the Covenant of Thorns trilogy (2012-2014), Sorcerous Moons (2016-), She has also written several series of more conventional romance, including Facets of Passion (2011-2013) , Falling Under (2014-2016), and Missed Connections (2017-) as well as a number of erotic vampire tales.

Kennedy's most famous series is her award-winning fantasy romance trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms, which was published in 2014 and 2015. The series tells the stories of three sisters, Princesses Ursula, Andromeda, and Amelia, who discover romance and adventure while uncovering the secrets of their birth and struggling against their increasingly unstable father King Uorsin. The first book, The Mark of the Tala, received a starred Library Journal review and was nominated for the Romantic Times Book of the Year; its sequel, The Tears of the Rose, received a Top Pick Gold and was nominated for the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won that same award for 2015. In 2015, Kennedy began publishing the spinoff Twelve Kingdoms series The Uncharted Realms. The first book, The Pages of the Mind, was nominated for the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2016 and won the 2017 RITA Award for Paranormal Romance. The second book in the series, released in late 2016, was The Edge of the Blade. Five additional Forgotten Empires novels followed before Kennedy brought the sweeping Tala saga to a conclusion in February 2020 with the publication of The Fate of the Tala.

She has recently completed a new fantasy series - The Forgotten Empires, which began in 2019 with the publication of The Orchid Throne and continued through The Fiery Crown (2020) and The Promised Queen (2021). A prolific writer, Kennedy has begun several new series: the 4-volume (to date) Heirs of Magic series (2021-2022) and Bonds of Magic (3 books to date, 2021-2022).

Kennedy currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She served as the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) from 2021-2023.

Jeannine Hall Gailey was born on April 30, 1973, at the Yale University Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. She spent her childhood in Los Angeles and Oak Ridge, and her teenage and early college years in Cincinnati, before moving to Virginia, Seattle, and California. Her first degree was a B.S. in pre-med Biology; her second was an M.A. in English, both from the University of Cincinnati. She learned to program a simple computer game when she was seven years old on her father's TRS-80; this probably led to her early career, for a dozen years, as a technical writer, and then a manager of technical writers, for such companies as AT&T and Microsoft. She then returned to college to get her M.F.A at Pacific University in Oregon, and she published her first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, at the age of 32.

Gailey works as a poetry book reviewer and has volunteered at many Seattle-area magazines, including Seattle Review, Raven Chronicles, and Crab Creek Review. In 2012-2013, she served as the second Poet Laureate for Redmond, Washington, where her motto was "geeks for poetry, poetry for geeks." In addition to her many works published in poetry journals and elsewhere, she is the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist's Daughter (2015), and Field Guide to the End of the World (2016). This last work won the 2015 Moon City Press Book Prize for Poetry and the 2017 Elgin Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her latest book of poetry, Flare, Corona, was published in April 2023 by BOA Editions as #201 in the "American Poets Continuum Series".

She has won a number of awards for her work, including a 2011 Florida Publishers Association Prize for Poetry (for _She Returns to the Floating World),_which was also a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal. She was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2007 and again in 2011. Gailey also won "Honorable Mention" in the 2008 Mainichi Haiku Contest. Several of Gailey's poems have been included in major genre anthologies, which include _The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007_and The Year's Best Horror, Volume Six(2014).

Gailey counts among the most influential works on her writing Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Bible, and the works of Margaret Atwood, Kelly Link, AS Byatt, and Haruki Murakami; as well as comic books from the mid-eighties, and Hayao Miyazaki's anime classics. She currently resides in Redmond, Washington, with her husband, cats, and a teeming collection of out-of-print Andrew Lang fairy books, comics, and poetry books.

Emily P. Devenport Hogan is a science fiction writer based in Arizona, married to fellow writer Ernest Hogan. Devenport's publishing debut was in 1987, with her short story "Shade and the Elephant Man", published in Aboriginal Science Fiction in May 1987. The story was the basis of Devenport's first novel, Shade (1991), whose eponymous title character is a runaway orphan and psychic enmeshed in intrigue in a decadent alien city. It was followed by a sequel in 1993, Larissa.

Devenport's first stand-alone novel, Scorpianne was published in 1994, and told the story of Lucy, a prostitute who escapes a murder attempt on Earth and finds herself on Mars trying to avoid the ruthless assassin Scorpianne. Her two-book space operas EggHeads (1994) and GodHeads (1996) were separated in publication time by 1997's The Kronos Connection. Kronos concerns a group of psychically gifted children struggling against the mysterious Three - a trio of powerful telepathic adults who abuse the children and seek to use them for their own evil ends.

Under the pseudonym "Lee Hogan", Devenport published in 2000 the novel Broken Time, which was nominated for the 2001 Philip K. Dick Award. The novel concerns heroine Siggy Lindquist and her struggles against aliens and inmates at the offworld Institute for the Criminally Insane. Another two-book space opera, the Belarus series (Belarus in 2002, and Enemies in 2003) was published under the name "Lee Hogan". Devenport's most recent novels have been the two-volume "Medusa Cycle" - set in the far future aboard a socially stratified generation ship, the series consists of Medusa Uploaded (2018) and Medusa in the Graveyard (2019).

Devenport has written a number of short stories, including 1988's "Cat Scratch", which won Aboriginal Science Fiction's Boomerang Award for Best Story, that have been published in periodicals including Aboriginal, Critical Mass, Asimov's Science Fiction, Uncanny, and Clarkesworld.

A.M. Dellamonica

Alyxandra Margaret (Alyx) Dellamonica was born on February 25, 1968, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. A creative person from her earliest years, as a child and a young woman, Dellamonica did a great deal of work in local and community theater before she embarked on her writing career in earnest. She published her first short story, "Lucre's Egg" in the Autumn 1994 issue of Crank! Magazine. in 1995 she attended the storied Clarion West science fiction writers workshop in Seattle, WA, and began writing numerous short stories. (Some were mysteries written under the name 'Ashley Craft'.) She has published over 40 stories to date in numerous periodicals and anthologies, along with numerous essays and book reviews.

In 2009 Dellamonica published her first novel: Indigo Springs, an intense fantasy chronicling the fallout from the introduction of magical substance first into a small Oregon town, and then into the larger world. The novel won the 2010 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. It was followed by a sequel, Blue Magic, in 2012. In 2014 Dellamonica embarked on a new series, which takes place on the island-dotted oceanic world of Stormwrack. The three novels in the series, Child of A Hidden Sea(2014), A Daughter of No Nation(2015), and The Nature of A Pirate(2016) tell the story of Sophie Hansa, a marine biologist from San Francisco who is swept into Stormwrack and its complicated variety of cultures and nations and the political and religious intrigues that drive them. The middle work won the 2016 Prix Aurora for Best English Novel. She also wrote several stories set in the same universe, "Among The Silvering Herd" (2012), "The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti" (2014), and "The Glass Galago" (2016).

Under the pseudonym L.X. Beckett, Dellamonica has written a near-future novel Gamechanger, set on an Earth emerging from a long period of environmental collapse and political unrest into a brighter, virtual reality-driven collective future (the "Bounceback"). Gamechanger was a finalist for the 2020 Sunburst Award, and was followed by a sequel, Dealbreaker, in 2021. Beckett has also published two novellas set in the Bounceback universe: "Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling" (2018), a finalist for the 2019 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Science Fiction; and "The Immolation of Kev Magee" (2020). Most recently as Beckett, she has written the 2022 story "Salvage Blossom".

Dellamonica had a James Bond story, "Through Your Eyes Only", published in the anthology Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond(ChiZine, November 2015). She was also the co-editor of Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. She has published a number of other works of short fiction, including "A Key to the Illuminated Heretic" (2005), which was nominated for the 2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for Best Short Form; "The Town on Blighted Sea" (2007); "The Color of Paradox" (2014); "The Boy Who Would Not be Enchanted" (2016); and (as Beckett) "The HazMat Sisters" (2021), nominated for the 2022 Asimov's Readers Award for Best Novelette. As Beckett, she also writes poetry: her 2021 poem "What The Time Travellers Saw" was nominated for the 2022 Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem.

Dellamonica is married to author Kelly Robson, and lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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.

The popular and skilled urban fantasy writer Roxanne Longstreet was born on April 27, 1962, in White Sands, NM, and grew up in West Texas. She graduated with a B.A. in Accounting from Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University in 1985. Her first novel, the fantasy Stormriders, based on the Shadow World role-playing game, was published in 1990 (and republished in 1996 under the pseudonym 'Ian Hammell'). She then wrote three horror novels and one thriller between 1993-1996, all under her original name.

After marrying artist Richard Conrad in 1992, Conrad then wrote two mystery-thrillers under the name 'Roxanne Conrad': Copper Moon (1997) and Bridge of Shadows (1998). In 2002, the thriller Exile, TX was also published under her married name.

2003 saw the debut of Conrad's writing career under her most famous pen name, 'Rachel Caine'. She published Ill Wind, the first of her popular Weather Warden series published by Roc from 2003-2011. The urban fantasy series, which ran in two series across 14 novels and several short stories, takes place on an Earth where a group of individuals called Wardens can control different elemental forces and use that power to protect humanity from natural disasters. The series' main character, Joanne Baldwin, is a Weather Warden, and the main series involves her adventures. An offshoot series, Outcast Season, concerns an outcast Djinn who seeks safety and a new life amongst the Wardens. In 2015, Caine launched a Kickstarter to fund a new novel in the series, entitled Red Hot Rain, but the book was unfinished due to Caine's health complications and her 2020 death.

Other series followed. In 2005-2006, Caine produced the two-book Red Letter Days series, an urban fantasy/paranormal romance about two female detectives who find themselves obliged to start taking cases from a supernatural client with their own agenda. From 2011-2013, Caine published three books in her Revivalist series, telling the story of Bryn Davis, a woman murdered by her pharmaceutical corporate overlords and revived from death via an experimental drug on which she now relies for continued existence. Her final series for adults was the best-selling Stillhouse Lake series of mysteries, starring Tennessee PI Gwen Proctor and beginning with Stillhouse Lake in 2017. The fifth book in the series, Heartbreak Bay was published posthumously in 2021 and was Caine's last published book.

Caine was no stranger to works of fantasy, science fiction, and horror for young adults. Her popular The Morganville Vampires series ran for 15 books, beginning with Glass Houses in 2006 and ending with the short story "Home" in 2019, was set in the fictional West Texas town in Morganville, a town owned by vampires as a sanctuary and where they live in uneasy tension with humans. The series was adapted as a web series in 2014 and lasted for one season, starring Amber Benson and Robert Picardo.

In 2015, Caine published the first in her YA alternate history/fantasy The Great Library series - Ink and Bone. The series is set in a world where the Great Library of Alexandria was never destroyed, and over the succeeding millennia has taken control of the world and the flow of information. Tne protagonists are several young Librarians who band together after discovering the injustice and tyranny behind the Library, and seek to bring it down through revolution. The series has five books, concluding with Sword and Pen in 2019. Caine co-wrote, with Ann Aguirre, another YA series - The Honors, a three-book space opera about a young woman named Zara Cole, who as an "Honor" pilots a living ship called a Leviathan along with her co-pilot Beatriz Teixiera. The first book in the series, Honor Among Thieves (2018) was named to the LITA Excellence in Children's and Young Adult Science Fiction Notable List for 2019. In addition to these series, Caine also wrote a YA standalone, Prince of Shadows (2015), a fantasy take on Romeo and Juliet.

Caine wrote several other standalone works as well, including Line of Sight (2007), a volume in the Athena Force series of novels about graduates of the Athena Academy, an elite school for girls with special talents, as they combat kidnappers, terrorists, and the forces of evil; a Stargate SG-1 media tie-in novel, Sacrifice Moon in 2007 (under the name 'Julie Fortune'), and a number of short stories contained in different science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal romance anthologies.

Rachel Caine lived for much of her life in Fort Worth, Texas, with her husband R. "Cat" Conrad. She was diagnosed in 2019 with soft-tissue sarcoma, and died on November 1, 2020. Caine was posthumously awarded the 2021 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to science fiction and fantasy by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

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.