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.

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.

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.

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.