TANANARIVE DUE (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is the award-winning author of The Wishing Pool & Other Stories and the upcoming The Reformatory ("A masterpiece"—Library Journal). She and her husband, Steven Barnes, co-wrote the Black Horror graphic novel The Keeper, illustrated by Marco Finnegan. Due and Barnes co-host a podcast, "Lifewriting: Write for Your Life!" A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She and her husband live with their son, Jason.

Geoffrey Thorne is an American novelist and screenwriter. Thorne was born in the United States and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. After winning Second Prize in Simon & Schuster's sixth annual Strange New Worlds anthology with his story "The Soft Room," he went on to publish more stories in several media tie-in anthologies as well as the Star Trek: Titan novel Sword of Damocles. As a screenwriter, Thorne has worked with Disney, Cartoon Network, STARZ, developing various properties. His TV work includes BEN 10: ULTIMATE ALIEN & OMNIVERSE, LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT and the hit TNT series', LEVERAGE and THE LIBRARIANS. Thorne is the co-founder and writing partner in GENRE 19, a studio he formed with artist Todd Harris in 2008.

Lauren Beukes is an award-winning, best-selling novelist who also writes screenplays, TV shows, comics and journalism. Her books have been translated into 26 languages and have been optioned for film and TV. Her awards include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the prestigious University of Johannesburg prize, the August Derleth Prize, the Strand Critics Choice Award and the RT Thriller of the Year. She’s been honoured in South Africa’s parliament and most recently won the Mbokondo Award from the Department of Arts and Culture, celebrating women in the arts for her work in the Creative Writing field. She is the author of Broken Monsters, about art, ambition, damaged people and not-quite-broken cities, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer, the nature of violence, and how we are haunted by history, Zoo City, a phantasmagorical noir set in Johannesburg which won the Arthur C Clarke Award and Moxyland, a dystopian political thriller about a corporate apartheid state where people are controlled by their cell phones. Her first book was a feminist pop-history, Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past, which has recently been reprinted. Her comics work includes Survivors' Club, an original Vertigo comic with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly, the New York Times-bestselling graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom with Inaki Miranda, and a Wonder Woman one-shot for kids, “The Trouble With Cats” in Sensation Comics, set in Mozambique and Soweto and drawn by Mike Maihack. Her film and TV work includes directing the documentary, Glitterboys & Ganglands, about Cape Town’s biggest female impersonation beauty pageant. The film won best LGBT film at the San Diego Black Film Festival. She was the showrunner on South Africa’s first full length animated TV series, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika which ran for 104 half hour episodes from 2006-2009 on SABC3. She’s also written for the Disney shows Mouk and Florrie’s Dragons and on the satirical political puppet show,ZANews and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s South African Story. Before that she was a freelance journalist for eight years, writing about electricity cable thieves, TB, circumcision, telemedicine, great white sharks, homeless sex workers, Botswana’s first female high court judge, and Barbie as a feminist icon for magazines ranging from The Sunday Times Lifestyle to Nature Medicine, Colors, The Big Issue and Marie Claire. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her daughter. www.laurenbeukes.com Twitter.com/laurenbeukes Instagram.com/laurenbeukes Facebook.com/laurenbeukes Awards & Achievements 2015 South Africa’s Mbokondo Award for Women In The Arts: Creative Writing 2014 August Derleth Award for The Shining Girls 2014 Strand Critics Choice Award for The Shining Girls 2014 NPR Best Books of the Year Broken Monsters 2014 LA Times Best Books of the Year Broken Monsters 2013 University of Johannesburg Literature Prize for The Shining Girls 2013 RT Thriller of the Year for The Shining Girls 2013 WHSmith Richard & Judy BookClub Choice 2013 Exclusive Books’ Bookseller’s Choice for The Shining Girls 2013 Amazon Best Mysteries and Thrillers for The Shining Girls 2011 Kitschies Red Tentacle for Zoo City 2010 Arthur C Clarke Award for Zoo City