Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a renowned and award-winning writer (under several pseudonyms as well as her real name) and editor of speculative fiction. Her published literary debut was the short story "Spare the Rat and Spoil the Child", released in 1987; this was the first in her long career writing short fiction, which to date has been assembled into nineteen separate collections. Several of her stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, and other industry awards: these include "Fast Cars" (1990), "The Gallery of Her Dreams" (1991, winner of the 1992 Locus Award), "Echea" (1998, winner of the 1998 HOMer Award and 1999 Asimov's Readers Award ), and "The Retrieval Artist" (2000). Her novelette "Millennium Babies" won the 2001 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, and she has won several additional Asimov's Readers Awards for her short fiction ("Diving Into The Wreck", 2005; "Recovering Apollo 8", 2008; "The Application of Hope", 2014; "Inhuman Garbage", 2016; and "Lieutenant Tightass", 2019). "Recovering Apollo 8" also won the 2007 Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History. Her 1989 story "Phantom" was nominated for the Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction. Rusch's short fiction has appeared in more than twenty Best Of The Year collections.

Rusch is also a well-received author of long form fiction, having written close to 100 novels since The White Mists of Power (1991). She has produced 10 novels (and several shorter works) within her "Diving Universe", and is responsible for creating several other literary universes, including "Faerie Justice", "Retrieval Artist", and "The Fey". In addition, Rusch has written books set in the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Aliens media franchises. She writes mysteries under the name "Kris Nelscott", and lighthearted romance and mystery works as "Kristine Grayson". Her 2002 "Retrieval Artist" novel The Disappeared won the 2002 Endeavour Award.

Rusch has also had a distinguished career as a professional editor and publisher. With her husband and fellow author Dean Wesley smith she co-founded the small press Pulphouse Publishing, which from 1988-1996 published 244 different titles from a wide variety of speculative writers through the hardback magazine Pulphouse, a more standard literary magazine, Pulphouse Weekly, and Author's Choice Monthly, a series of chapbooks from writers that included Lewis Shiner, Jack Williamson, Ron Goulart, Kate Wilhelm, Joe R. Lansdale, Charles de Lint, and Roger Zelazny. Pulphouse publications were nominated for numerous awards, and the hardback magazine won the 1989 World Fantasy Award for Special Award, Non-Professional.

From 1991-1997, Rusch edited the storied The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and originally edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Under her editorship, F&SF began publishing more dark fantasy and and horror to complement its existing science fiction and fantasy corpus. She won the 1994 Hugo Award for Best Editor for her editorial work at F&SF, and the magazine itself was nominated for several industry awards during her tenure.

Rusch won the 1990 Campbell/Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

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.