Christopher Kastensmidt was born in Texas but has lived in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 2001. Christopher was a Nebula Award finalist and winner of the Realms of Fantasy Readers' Choice Awards for his novelette "The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara." This story was the first in The Elephant and Macaw Banner fantasy series, which has since been published in six countries and adapted to comics and games. These stories feature a Dutch explorer and Yoruban slave who meet in sixteenth-century Brazil and begin a series of adventures together, harkening to old Sword & Sorcery heroes like Fritz Leiber´s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Charles R. Saunder's Imaro. Christopher ran Brazilian video game developer Southlogic Studios for a decade before its sale to Ubisoft Brazil, where he served as Creative Director. He participated in the production of thirty internationally-published video games, totalling millions of units sold. Christopher has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and a Master's degree in Social Communication from the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul. Besides writing, he lectures at UniRitter university on scriptwriting, game designm and video game production. To learn more about The Elephant and Macaw Banner series, please visit www.eamb.org, where Christopher posts news, artwork, and in-depth explanations of historical and cultural references used in the stories.