Elizabeth Moon was born March 7, 1945, and grew up in McAllen, Texas, graduating from McAllen High School in 1963. She has a B.A. in History from Rice University (1968) and another in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin (1975) with graduate work in Biology at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She served in the USMC from 1968 to 1971, first at MCB Quantico and then at HQMC. She married Richard Moon, a Rice classmate and Army officer, in 1969; they moved to the small central Texas town where they still live in 1979. They have one son, born in 1983. She started writing stories and poems as a small child; attempted first book (an illustrated biography of the family dog) at age six. Started writing science fiction in high school, but considered writing merely a sideline. First got serious about writing (as in, submitting things and actually getting money...) in the 1980s. Made first fiction sale at age forty—"Bargains" to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress III and "ABCs in Zero G" to Analog. Her first novel, Sheepfarmer's Daughter, sold in 1987 and came out in 1988; it won the Compton Crook Award in 1989. Remnant Population was a Hugo nominee in 1997, and The Speed of Dark was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and won the Nebula in 2004.

Sarah A. Hoyt was born (and raised) in Portugal and now lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons, and a variable number of cats, depending on how many show up to beg on the door step. In between lays the sort of resume that used to be de-rigueur for writers. She has never actually wrestled alligators, but she did at one point very briefly tie bows on bags of potpourri for a living. She has also washed dishes and ironed clothes for a living. Worst of all she was, for a long time, a multilingual scientific translator. At some point, though, she got tired of making an honest living and started writing. She has over 30 published novels, in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical mystery, historical fantasy and historical biography. Her short stories have been published in Analog, Asimov's, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and a number of anthologies from DAW and Baen. Her space-opera novel Darkship Thieves was the 2011 Prometheus Award Winner, and the third novel in the series, A Few Good Men, was a finalist for the honor. She also won the Dragon Award for Uncharted (with Kevin J. Anderson.) a.k.a. Sarah D'Almeida a.k.a. Elise Hyatt a.k.a. Sarah Marqués

Roger Zelazny made his name with a group of novellas which demonstrated just how intense an emotional charge could be generated by the stock imagery of sf; the most famous of these is A Rose for Ecclesiastes in which a poet struggles to convince dying and sterile Martians that life is worth continuing. Zelazny continued to write excellent short stories throughout his career. Most of his novels deal, one way or another, with tricksters and mythology, often with rogues who become gods, like Sam in Lord of Light, who reinvents Buddhism as a vehicle for political subversion on a colony planet. The fantasy sequence The Amber Chronicles, which started with Nine Princes in Amber, deals with the ruling family of a Platonic realm at the metaphysical heart of things, who can slide, trickster-like through realities, and their wars with each other and the related ruling house of Chaos. Zelazny never entirely fulfilled his early promise—who could?—but he and his work were much loved, and a potent influence on such younger writers as George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman. He won the Nebula award three times (out of 14 nominations) and the Hugo award six times (out of 14 nominations). His papers are housed at the Albin O. Khun Library of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger\_Ze...

Writer, editor, and activist Lee Martindale has been called “a force of nature” and “Hell on Wheels” for very good reasons. She's edited a groundbreaking anthology (SUCH A PRETTY FACE), released a CD of original filk music (THE LADIES OF TRADE TOWN) and an audiochapbook CD (TO STAND AS WITNESS: THREE ARTHURIAN TALES). Her recent works include PREJUDICE BY THE POUND, a collection of essays and editorials from ten years of Rump Parliament Magazine, and stories in TURN THE OTHER CHICK, CATOPOLIS, WITCH WAY TO THE MALL, WARRIOR WISEWOMAN 2, and FANGS FOR THE MAMMARIES. Lee recently celebrated the release of THE LADIES OF TRADE TOWN, an anthology of genre stories on “the world’s oldest profession” from HarpHaven Publishing. When not slinging fiction, Lee is a Named Bard, Lifetime Active Member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (where’s she’s currently on the Board of Directors), a fencing member of the SFWA Musketeers, and a member of the SCA.

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, editor, and translator from Brooklyn, NY. He's the author of The Middling Affliction (2022) and Eridani's Crown (2019) fantasy novels. Kakistocracy, a sequel to The Middling Affliction, is forthcoming in 2023. Over 120 of his stories have been published in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, and many other venues. He won the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and was a two-time finalist (2015 and 2017) for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction. His collection, Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories and his steampunk humor novella H. G. Wells, Secret Agent were published in 2015. His second collection, The Golem of Deneb Seven and Other Stories followed in 2018. Alex is the editor of over a dozen anthologies, including the Unidentified Funny Objects annual anthology series of humorous SF/F.

Janni Lee Simner lives in the Arizona desert, where the plants know how to bite and the dandelions really do have thorns; in spite of these things—or maybe because of them—she's convinced she lives in one of the most stunning places on earth. Janni has published four novels for young adults, the Bones of Faerie trilogy and Thief Eyes, and she wrote the script for the video game The Huntsman: Winter's Curse. She's also published four books for younger readers—most recently Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer—as well as more than 30 short stories, including appearances in Cricket magazine and the Welcome to Bordertown anthology.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. Elizabeth A. Vaughan is the author of the Chronicles of the Warlands, a fantasy romance trilogy from Tor Books: Warprize (her first novel), Warsworn, and Warlord.. She's always loved fantasy and science fiction, and has been a fantasy role-player since 1981. By day, Beth's secret identity is that of a lawyer, practicing in the area of bankruptcy and financial matters, a role she has maintained since 1985. Beth is owned by three cats, and lives in the Northwest Territory, on the outskirts of the Black Swamp, along Mad Anthony's Trail on the banks of the Maumee River.

John W. Campbell Award Winner Wen Spencer resides in paradise in Hilo, Hawaii with two volcanoes overlooking her home. Spencer says that she often wakes up and exclaims "Oh my god, I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific!" This, says Spencer, is a far cry from her twenty years of living in land-locked Pittsburgh. The Elfhome series opener, Tinker, won the 2003 Sapphire Award for Best Science Fiction Romance and was a finalist for the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Fantasy Novel. Wolf Who Rules, the sequel to Tinker, was chosen as a Top Pick by Romantic Times and given their top rating of four and a half stars. Other Baen books include space opera thriller Endless Blue and Eight Million Gods.

When I am not writing, I toss tennis balls to my cadre of dogs. My house is filled with books and dogs, you can smell both when you walk in the front door. It's a good smell. I have 36 published novels and am currently writing in the mystery genre. My latest mystery, The Dead of Winter, was a finalist for the Claymore Award and is the first in the Piper Blackwell series. I live in a tiny town in the middle of Illinois that has a Dollar General, a pizza place with exceedingly slow service, a veterinarian (good thing, eh?), and train tracks...lots of train tracks.

Writes with Shariann Lewitt as Gordon Kendall. She received her B.A. in English from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and a PhD in English from Harvard University.

Dr Harry Norman Turtledove is an American novelist, who has produced a sizeable number of works in several genres including alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction. Harry Turtledove attended UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in Byzantine history in 1977. Turtledove has been dubbed "The Master of Alternate History". Within this genre he is known both for creating original scenarios: such as survival of the Byzantine Empire; an alien invasion in the middle of the World War II; and for giving a fresh and original treatment to themes previously dealt with by other authors, such as the victory of the South in the American Civil War; and of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. His novels have been credited with bringing alternate history into the mainstream. His style of alternate history has a strong military theme.

BIO—NANCY SPRINGER Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone, having written that many novels for adults, young adults and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magical realism, horror, and mystery—although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. DARK LIE, recently released from NAL, is her first venture into mass-market psychological suspense. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Nancy Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan, now 38, and Nora, 34), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and birdwatching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida panhandle, where the birdwatching is spectacular and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

Pen Names Edward Taft Dee W. Schofield D.W. Smith Sandy Schofield Kathryn Wesley Dean Wesley Smith is the bestselling author of over ninety novels under many names and well over 100 published short stories. He has over eight million copies of his books in print and has books published in nine different countries. He has written many original novels in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller, and romance as well as books for television, movies, games, and comics. He is also known for writing quality work very quickly and has written a large number of novels as a ghost writer or under house names. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. The following is a list of novels under the Dean Wesley Smith name, plus a number of pen names that are open knowledge. Many ghost and pen name books are not on this list because he is under contractual obligations not to disclose that he wrote them. Many of Dean’s original novels are also under hidden pen names for marketing reasons. Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made. Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. Currently, he is writing thrillers and mystery novels under another name.

Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won her the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She has just published WARPAINT, the second stand-alone novel in her Cadence Drake series. Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows: “So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived. “My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks. “It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint. From the size of it, it’s a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.” “Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next. ” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’ “The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down. “We were not eaten by a bear that night…but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I’ll ever forget. “I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I’m putting on paper isn’t at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn’t make my cut.” You can find Holly on her personal site: Hollylisle.com You can find Cadence Drake, Holly's currently in-progress series, on her site: CadenceDrake.com You can find Holly's books, courses, writing workshops, and so on here: The HowToThinkSideways.com Shop, as well as on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in a number of bookstores in the US and around the world.