Beth Cato (1980-) is originally from Hanford, California, and after many years living and writing in Phoenix, Arizona, now lives in Red Wing, Minnesota. 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 (almost 200 poems), 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. Her 2021 poem "The Bookstore" won the 2022 Rhysling Award for Long Poem.

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 second book, "A Feast for Starving Stone was released in 2024. Cato has, in addition, published a non-SF comedic mystery, Cheddar Luck Next Time in early 2025, and in September 2025 will release a cozy fantasy novel, A House Between Sea and Sky*.

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.

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.

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.