Carrie Vaughn is the author more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories. She's best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. In 2018, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Bannerless, a post-apocalyptic murder mystery. She's published over 20 novels and 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado, where she collects hobbies. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com For writing advice and essays, check out her Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/carrievaughn

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani vagrant camped in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award and been nominated for the Nebula. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Tor.com, The Apex Book of World SF, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Black Static among other venues. He is a graduate of Clarion West. In Dec 2014, Usman led Pakistan’s first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore in conjunction with Desi Writers Lounge and Liberty Books.

Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu. Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist. Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy. He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012). Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie. His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century. Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011). Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012). He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog, and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there. He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers). Tidhar lives with his wife in London.

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan. She currently lives in Maine with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.

Peng Shepherd is the nationally bestselling author of The Cartographers, The Book of M, and The Future Library. Her second novel, The Cartographers, was a USA Today bestseller, a national Independent Bookstores bestseller, and was named a Best Book of 2022 by The Washington Post, as well as a Pick of the Month by Good Morning America, Amazon, Apple, Real Simple, Buzzfeed, Bustle, and Goodreads, and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Her first novel, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, a Best Book of the Summer by the Today Show and NPR On Point, and has been optioned for television. A graduate of New York University's MFA program, Peng is the recipient of a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, and Mexico City. When not writing, she can be found planning her next trip or haunting local bookstores.