Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and screenplays. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens, Stardust, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He co-created the TV series adaptions of Good Omens and The Sandman.
Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Jr. is an American actor, director, and television host. He played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), Kunta Kinte in the ABC miniseries Roots (1977), and was the host of the PBS Kids educational television series Reading Rainbow for 23 years (1983–2006). He received 12 Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award as host and executive producer of Reading Rainbow.
Reading Rainbow is an American educational children's television series that originally aired on PBS and afterward PBS Kids from July 11, 1983 to November 10, 2006, with reruns continuing to air until August 28, 2009. 155 30-minute episodes were produced over 23 seasons. Before its official premiere, the show aired for test audiences in the Nebraska and Buffalo, New York markets.
Alex Sanchez is a Mexican American author of award-winning novels for teens and adults. His first novel, Rainbow Boys (2001), was selected by the American Library Association (ALA), as a Best Book for Young Adults. Subsequent books have won additional awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. Although Sanchez's novels are widely accepted in thousands of school and public libraries in America, they have faced a handful of challenges and efforts to ban them. In Webster, New York, removal of Rainbow Boys from the 2006 summer reading list was met by a counter-protest from students, parents, librarians, and community members resulting in the book being placed on the 2007 summer reading list.
Kij Johnson is an American writer of fantasy. She is a faculty member at the University of Kansas.
Tananarive Priscilla Due is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood (2001). She is also known as a film historian with expertise in Black horror. Due teaches a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic", which focuses on the Jordan Peele film Get Out.
"Kin" is a science fiction short story by American writer Bruce McAllister, originally published in the February 2006 issue of the Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
"Tideline" is a science fiction short story by American writer Elizabeth Bear, published in 2007. It won the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Award. "Tideline" appears in the twenty-fifth volume of Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction anthology. In 2020 "Tideline" was read by LeVar Burton for the Stitcher Radio podcast LeVar Burton Reads.
Karen E. Bender is an American novelist and short story writer.
The Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in Children's Programming was an Emmy award given to performers in television programming aimed towards children. During the 1970s and 1980s, guest performers in dramatic specials and regular performers on children's series competed in the same category. However, starting in 1989, separate categories for performances in children's series and performances in children's specials were created and used until after 2007 when all categories related to Children's Specials were dropped.
Crissle West is an American writer and comedian. She is best known as the co-host of the pop culture podcast The Read. She has starred in episodes of Drunk History, on which she has told the story of Harriet Tubman's work as a Union spy during the Civil War, as well as Marsha P. Johnson and the Stonewall riot.
Uncanny Magazine is an American science fiction and fantasy online magazine, edited and published by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, based in Urbana, Illinois. Its mascot is a space unicorn.
Fonda Lee is a Canadian-American author of speculative fiction. She is best known for writing The Green Bone Saga, the first of which, Jade City, won the 2018 World Fantasy Award and was named one of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Time magazine. The Green Bone Saga was also included on NPR's list, "50 Favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the Past Decade".
Tochi Onyebuchi is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and former civil rights lawyer. His 2020 novella, Riot Baby, received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the World Fantasy Award in 2021. He is known for incorporating civil rights and Afrofuturism into his stories and novels.
FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, or simply FIYAH, is an American-based quarterly electronic magazine of Black speculative fiction. The magazine was announced in September 2016, inspired by the 1920s experimental periodical FIRE! created by Wallace Thurman. It was developed by a group of writers led by Troy L. Wiggins, L.D. Lewis, and Justina Ireland. The first edition of the magazine was published in 2017. FIYAH has been nominated for the Best Semi-Prozine Hugo Award five times, most recently in 2023, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Semi-Prozine in 2021.
A fantasy podcast is a podcast related to or discussing the fantasy genre, which usually focuses on the magical, supernatural, mythical, or folkloric. Fantasy stories are set in fictional universes or fantasy worlds that are often reminiscent of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Despite having a fictional setting, fantasy stories can contain or reference locations, events, or people from the real world. Characters in these stories often encounter fictional creatures such as dwarves, elves, dragons, and fairies. Common types of fantasy podcasts are audio dramas, narrated short stories, role-playing games, or discussions and reviews of fantasy topics such as fantasy films, books, games, and other media. The intended audience of a fantasy podcast can vary from young children to adults. Fantasy podcasts emerged from storytelling and the creation of the radio. Fantasy podcasts have often been adapted into television programs, graphic novels, and comics. Fantasy podcasts are a subgenre of fiction podcasts and are distinguished from science fiction podcasts and horror podcasts by the absence of scientific or macabre themes, respectively, though these subgenres regularly overlap.
Richie Narvaez is an American author and professor. In 2020, he won an Agatha Award and an Anthony Award for his novel Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco. His work focuses on the Puerto Rican and Nuyorican experience.
The Dragon Republic is a grimdark fantasy novel written by R. F. Kuang and published by HarperCollins. The book was published on August 6, 2019, as a sequel to The Poppy War.
Deborah Treisman is the Fiction Editor for The New Yorker. Treisman also hosts craft conversations with The New Yorker short fiction contributors discussing their favorite stories from the magazine's archives in the Fiction podcast, and authors reading their own recently-published work in The Writer's Voice podcast.
Cadwell Turnbull is an American science fiction and fantasy writer from the U.S. Virgin Islands. He is the author of award-winning short stories and novels, including The Lesson (2019) and No Gods, No Monsters (2021).
