NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him. Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.

Born, 20th April, 1958, Simon Clark is the author of such highly regarded horror novels as Nailed By The Heart, Blood Crazy, Darker, Vampyrrhic and The Fall, while his short stories have been collected in Blood & Grit and Salt Snake & Other Bloody Cuts. He has also written prose material for the internationally famous rock band U2. Raised in a family of storytellers – family legend told of a stolen human skull buried beneath the Clark garage – he sold his first ghost story to a radio station in his teens. Before becoming a full-time writer he held a variety of day jobs, that have involved strawberry picking, supermarket shelf stacking, office work, and scripting video promos. He lives with his wife and two children in mystical territory that lies on the border of Robin Hood country in England.

Tamar Yellin is an author and teacher who lives in Yorkshire. Her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, won the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Tamar Yellin was raised in Leeds. Her father was a third-generation native of Jerusalem;[2] his father was Yitzhak Yaakov Yellin (1885–1964), one of the pioneers of the Hebrew language press in pre-state Israel. Her mother was the daughter of a Polish immigrant to England. Yellin attended the Leeds Girls' High School. She studied biblical and modern Hebrew language and Arabic language at the University of Oxford She spent 13 years writing her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher (2005) and took two years to find a publisher. This was followed by a collection of 13 short stories, Kafka in Brontëland (2006) and another novel, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes (2008). She also writes fiction for magazines, including The London Magazine and the Jewish Quarterly, and has published stories in two anthologies, The Slow Mirror and Other Stories: New Fiction by Jewish Writers (1996) and Mordecai's First Brush with Love: New Stories by Jewish Women in Britain (2004). Yellin is a teacher for the Interfaith Education Center, in which capacity she speaks to non-Jewish schoolchildren about Jewish religious practices.

Paul Kane has been writing professionally for almost fifteen years. His genre journalism has appeared in such magazines as Fangoria, SFX and Rue Morgue, and his non-fiction books are the critically acclaimed The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy and Voices in the Dark. His award-winning short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as being broadcast on BBC Radio 2), and has been collected in Alone (In the Dark), Touching the Flame, FunnyBones, Peripheral Visions, Shadow Writer, The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, The Spaces Between and GHOSTS. His novella Signs of Life reached the shortlist of the British Fantasy Awards 2006, The Lazarus Condition was introduced by Mick Garris - creator of Masters of Horror - RED featured artwork from Dave (The Graveyard Book) McKean and Pain Cages was introduced by Stephen Volk (The Awakening). As Special Publications Editor of the British Fantasy Society he worked with authors like Brian Aldiss, Ramsey Campbell, Muriel Gray and Robert Silverberg, he is the co-editor of Hellbound Hearts for Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster), an anthology of original stories inspired by Clive Barker's mythos - featuring contributions from the likes of Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, Kelley Armstrong and Richard Christian Matheson - The Mammoth Book of Body Horror (Constable & Robinson) - featuring Stephen King, James Herbert and Robert Bloch - and the Poe-inspired Beyond Rue Morgue (for Titan). In 2008 his zombie story 'Dead Time' was turned into an episode of the Lionsgate/NBC TV series Fear Itself, adapted by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II-IV). He also scripted The Opportunity which premiered at Cannes in 2009, The Weeping Woman - starring Fright Night's Stephen Jeffreys - and Wind Chimes (directed by Brad '7th Dimension' Watson. He is the author of the novels Of Darkness and Light, The Gemini Factor and the bestselling Arrowhead trilogy (Arrowhead, Broken Arrow and Arrowland), a post-apocalyptic reworking of the Robin Hood mythology gathered together as the sell-out Hooded Man omnibus. His latest novels are Lunar (which is set to be turned into a feature film) and the short Y.A. book The Rainbow Man (as P.B. Kane). He currently lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife - the author Marie O'Regan - his family, and a black cat called Mina. You can find out more at his website www.shadow-writer.co.uk which has featured Guest Writers such as Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Dean Koontz, John Connolly and Guillermo del Toro.

Avital Gad-Cykman is the author of the flash collection "Life In, Life Out", published by Matter Press and the flash and story collection "Light Reflection Over Blues", published by Ravenna Press. http://ravennapress.com/books/light-r... Her work has appeared in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Ambit (UK), The Literary Review, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Prism International, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Other stories have been featured in anthologies such as W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International, Sonder Press' Best Small Fictions 2020, Politically Inspired Fiction, and The Best of Gigantic. Her flashes have been twice listed in Best of the WEB, Wigleaf. She is the winner of Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and first placed in The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest. Her story collections were finalists for Iowa Fiction award. She grew up in Israel, and lives in Brazil. She holds a PhD in English Literature with a focus on women authors, gender, minorities and trauma studies.