Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.

Nancy Kress is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops and at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the Winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress is the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany. Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury. In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963). Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio. Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.

Thomas K. Carpenter is a full time contemporary fantasy author with over 50 independently published titles. His bestselling, multi-series universe, The Hundred Halls, has over 25 books and counting. His stories focus on fantastic families, magical academies, and epic adventures. All the books can be found at major retailers and directly from the author at https://thomaskcarpenter.com/. You can sign up for his newsletter at https://www.subscribepage.com/trialso... When he is not writing, he enjoys playing turn-based strategy games and MTG, skiing, hiking, traveling, and chilling on the couch with his wife and their little dog, Loki, at home in the beautiful mountains of Colorado.

George Nikolopoulos is a speculative fiction writer from Athens, Greece. His short stories have been published (and/or are pending) in Galaxy's Edge, Nature Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Factor Four, Dream Forge, Grievous Angel, Best Vegan SFF, The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF, Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine, Hybrid Fiction, Five Minutes in Hotel Stormcove, On Spec, Laughing at Shadows, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, Helios Quarterly Magazine, Selene Quarterly Magazine, Gallery of Curiosities, Murder Park After Dark, 99 Tiny Terrors, Unsung Stories, Lite Lit One, Bards & Sages Quarterly, Havok, The Centropic Oracle, StarShipSofa, 600 Second Saga, Antipodean SF, Manawaker Studio's FFP, SF Comet, Mad Scientist Journal, Truancy, Digital Fiction Pub's QuickFic, Sci Phi Journal, 9Tales from Elsewhere, Fifty Flashes, Timeshift, Drabbledark, Martian, Sins and Other Worlds, Angels, Monsters, Gruff Variations, Scarlet Leaf Review, Clash of the Titles, The Lane of Unusual Traders, Sky Castles, Event Horizon, Up and Coming–Stories by the 2016 Campbell-eligible Authors, Szortal, QuarterReads, Stella's Literary Bistro, Diasporic Literature Spot, as well as many magazines and anthologies in Greece and Cyprus. His children's fantasy novelette "The Three Princesses" has been published in Cyprus and his poetry collections "Glass Boats" and "Missed Opportunities" have been published in Greece. He is a member of Codex Writers' Group. He sometimes blogs at georgenikolopoulos.wordpress.com

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.