Anne Bishop is an American fantasy writer. Her most noted work is the Black Jewels series. She won the Crawford Award in 2000 for the first three Black Jewels books, sometimes called the Black Jewels trilogy: Daughter of the Blood, Heir to the Shadows, and Queen of the Darkness.
Steven H Silver is an American science fiction fan and bibliographer, publisher, author, and editor. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twelve times and Best Fanzine seven times without winning.
Gordon Van Gelder is an American science fiction editor. From 1997 until 2014, Van Gelder was editor and later publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for which he has twice won the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form. He was also a managing editor of The New York Review of Science Fiction from 1988 to 1993, for which he was nominated for the Hugo Award a number of times. In 2015, Van Gelder stepped down as editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction in favor of Charles Coleman Finlay, but remains publisher of the magazine.
Jonathan Strahan is an editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His family moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1968, and he graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986.
Laird Samuel Barron is an American author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, or horror noir and dark fantasy genres. He has also been the managing editor of the online literary magazine Melic Review. He lives in Upstate New York.
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Martha Wells is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky is an American author who works primarily in speculative fiction genres, writing under the name Elizabeth Bear. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Tideline", and the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Shoggoths in Bloom". She is one of a small number of writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Catherynne M. Valente is an American fiction writer, poet, and literary critic. For her speculative fiction novels she has won the annual James Tiptree, Andre Norton, and Mythopoeic Fantasy awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, the World Fantasy Award–winning anthologies Salon Fantastique and Paper Cities, along with numerous "Year's Best" volumes. Her critical work has appeared in the International Journal of the Humanities as well as in numerous essay collections.
Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, working across multiple genres. He has lived in the United Kingdom and South Africa for long periods of time, as well as Laos and Vanuatu. As of 2013, Tidhar has lived in London. His novel Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, beating Stephen King's 11/22/63 and George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons. His novel A Man Lies Dreaming won the £5000 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, for Best British Fiction, in 2015. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2017, for Central Station.
Joseph Hillström King, better known by the pen name Joe Hill, is an American writer. His work includes the novels Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016); the short story collections 20th Century Ghosts (2005) and Strange Weather (2017); and the comic book series Locke & Key (2008–2013). He has won awards including Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and an Eisner Award.
Lucy Sussex is an author working in fantasy and science fiction, children's and teenage writing, non-fiction and true crime. She is also an editor, reviewer, academic and teacher, and currently resides in Melbourne, Australia.
Alethea Kontis is an American writer of Teen & Young Adult Books, picture books and speculative fiction, primarily for children, as well as an essayist and storyteller. She is represented by Moe Ferrara at Bookends Literary Agency.
Lois Tilton is an American science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and horror writer who has won the Sidewise Award and been a finalist for the Nebula Award. She has also written a number of innovative vampire stories.
Geoffrey Maloney is an Australian writer of speculative short fiction.
Steven Paulsen is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror fiction whose work has been published in books, magazines, journals and newspapers around the world. He is the author of the best selling children's book, The Stray Cat, which has seen publication in several foreign language editions. His short story collection, Shadows on the Wall: Weird Tales of Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Supernatural), won the 2018 Australian Shadows Award for Best Collected Work, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Dreaming Down-Under, Terror Australis: Best Australian Horror, Strange Fruit, Fantastic Worlds, The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror, and Cthulhu Deep Down Under: Volume 3.
Rachel Swirsky is an American literary, speculative fiction and fantasy writer, poet, and editor living in Oregon. She was the founding editor of the PodCastle podcast and served as editor from 2008 to 2010. She served as vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2013.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is an American science fiction author and editor. He has edited twenty-two anthologies, and written a space opera trilogy, and an ongoing, near-future police procedural series set in Kansas City, Missouri, and a near future thriller novel being developed as a motion picture. He wrote a non-fiction book on how to write a novel. He was a finalist, with Jennifer Brozek, for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor for the anthology Shattered Shields. His anthology, Infinite Stars, was nominated for the 2018 Locus Award for Best Anthology.
Loren Rhoads is a San Francisco-based author, editor, and lecturer on cemetery history. She is a member of Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the Association for Gravestone Studies.
Mari Ness is an American poet, author, and critic. She has multiple publications in various science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies. Her work has been published in Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Lightspeed, Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and Uncanny Magazine. In Locus, Paula Guran said of The Girl and the House that Ness: "subverts and glorifies the clichés and tropes of every gothic novel ever written, in less than 1,800 words"
