Patricia Anne McKillip was an American author of fantasy and science fiction novels, distinguished by lyrical, delicate prose and careful attention to detail and characterization. She is a past winner of the World Fantasy Award and Locus Award, and she lives in Oregon. Most of her recent novels have cover paintings by Kinuko Y. Craft. She is married to David Lunde, a poet. According to Fantasy Book Review, Patricia McKillip grew up in Oregon, England, and Germany, and received a Bachelor of Arts (English) in 1971 and a Master of Arts in 1973 from San Jose State University. McKillip's stories usually take place in a setting similar to the Middle Ages. There are forests, castles, and lords or kings, minstrels, tinkers and wizards. Her writing usually puts her characters in situations involving mysterious powers that they don't understand. Many of her characters aren't even sure of their own ancestry. Music often plays an important role. Love between family members is also important in McKillip's writing, although members of her families often disagree.

Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence—Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha—not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche—perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.

Tanith Lee was a British writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. She was the author of 77 novels, 14 collections, and almost 300 short stories. She also wrote four radio plays broadcast by the BBC and two scripts for the UK, science fiction, cult television series "Blake's 7." Before becoming a full time writer, Lee worked as a file clerk, an assistant librarian, a shop assistant, and a waitress. Her first short story, "Eustace," was published in 1968, and her first novel (for children) The Dragon Hoard was published in 1971. Her career took off in 1975 with the acceptance by Daw Books USA of her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave for publication as a mass-market paperback, and Lee has since maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing. Lee twice won the World Fantasy Award: once in 1983 for best short fiction for “The Gorgon” and again in 1984 for best short fiction for “Elle Est Trois (La Mort).” She has been a Guest of Honour at numerous science fiction and fantasy conventions including the Boskone XVIII in Boston, USA in 1981, the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada, and Orbital 2008 the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) held in London, England in March 2008. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror. Lee was the daughter of two ballroom dancers, Bernard and Hylda Lee. Despite a persistent rumour, she was not the daughter of the actor Bernard Lee who played "M" in the James Bond series of films of the 1960s. Tanith Lee married author and artist John Kaiine in 1992.

MARVIN KAYE is the author of sixteen novels, including his Dickensian pastiche, The Last Christmas of Ebenezer Scrooge, now optioned to be made into a feature film, and his just-completed sequel to Frankenstein, as well as the terrifying Fantastique and Ghosts of Night and Morning; the SF cult classics, The Incredible Umbrella and (coauthored with Parke Godwin) The Masters of Solitude, and the critically-acclaimed mysteries Bullets for Macbeth and My Son the Druggist. His short story “Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin,” was included in a DAW Books Year’s Best Fantasy anthology, and his horrific “The Possession of Immanuel Wolf” was written with the great macabre comedian, Brother Theodore. His numerous best-selling anthologies include 13 Plays of Ghosts and the Supernatural and other theatre collections; The Game is Afoot and other Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and many fantasy/science fiction books for the Science Fiction Book Club, such as Ghosts, Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, The Vampire Sextette, and The Fair Folk, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology of 2006. His column, “Marvin Kaye’s Nth Dimension,” appears online at http://spaceandtimemagazine.com. He is the editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and both editor and co-publisher of America’s oldest supernatural periodical, Weird Tales magazine. A native of Philadelphia, PA., he is a graduate of Penn State, with an M. A. in theatre and English literature; he recently headed the tutoring staff of the Manhattan campus of Mercy College; is Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, has taught mystery writing in England for the Smithsonian Institute, has served as a judge for the Edgar, International Thriller Writers, Nero and World Fantasy Awards, and is Artistic Director for The Open Book, New York’s oldest readers theatre company. He is listed in both Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Entertainment.

Craig Shaw Gardner was born in Rochester, New York and lived there until 1967, when he moved to Boston, MA to attend Boston University. He graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Broadcasting and Film. He has continued to reside in Boston since that time. He published his first story in 1977 while he held a number of jobs: shipper/receiver for a men's suit manufacturer, working in hospital public relations, running a stat camera, and also managed of a couple of bookstores: The Million Year Picnic and Science Fantasy Bookstore. As of 1987 he became a full time writer, and since then he has published more than 30 novels and more than 50 short stories. He also published under these pseudonyms: Peter Garrison