Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA.

A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include The Reformatory (winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Chautauqua Prize, Bram Stoker Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and a New York Times Notable Book), The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

She was an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone on Paramount Plus, and two segments of Shudder’s anthology film Horror Noire. They also co-wrote their Black Horror graphic novel The Keeper, illustrated by Marco Finnegan. Due and Barnes co-host a podcast, Lifewriting: Write for Your Life! She and her husband live with their son, Jason.

Photo credit: Melissa Hibbert

Margaret Dunlap

Margaret Dunlap’s short fiction has previously appeared in Shimmer, The Deadlands, and as part of the writing team behind the Locus-nominated e-book and audio serial Bookburners. In her day job as a television writer, her credits include Blade Runner: Black Lotus, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, The Middleman, and the Emmy-winning Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. She lives in Los Angeles, on the web at www.margaretdunlap.com, and on Twitter as @spyscribe.

Robin M. Eames

Robin M. Eames is a queer crip punk poet who is only mostly dead. Their work has been published by Cordite, Voiceworks, Ibis House, Archer, Red Room, GlitterShip, Strange Horizons, and Luna Station Quarterly, among others. They live on Gadigal land. You can find them online at robinmeames.org and @robinmarceline.

Lindsey Godfrey Eccles

Houston-raised enchilada-lover Lindsey Godfrey Eccles lives and works in Seattle, spending as much time as she can in the mountains and occasionally practicing law. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, PodCastle, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her at lindseygodfreyeccles.com or on twitter at @LGEccles.

Jay Edidin

Jay Edidin is a writer, editor, podcaster, and internet whisperer; and a good card to pull out when your parents claim that knowing that Cyclops’s optic blasts aren’t lasers can’t net you a real job. He writes and edits comics, short fiction, and narrative nonfiction; knits fancy socks; and is marginally Internet Famous as half of the podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men.

Greg van Eekhout

Greg van Eekhout is the author of twelve novels, including California Bones, Voyage of the Dogs, Weird Kid, and dozens of short stories. His books have been finalists for the Nebula Award, Andre Norton Award, and Locus Award, and were listed by the New York Public Library among the best 100 books for children. Find him at www.writingandsnacks.com.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an African speculative fiction writer, editor, and publisher in Nigeria. He won the Nebula award and is a multiple Hugo Award finalist. He has also won the Otherwise, Nommo, and British Fantasy awards and has been a finalist in the Locus, BSFA, & Sturgeon awards. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Strange Horizons, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex, Asimov’s, Tor.com, and more. He edited and published the Bridging Worlds non-fiction anthology, the first ever Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction anthology, and co-edited the Dominion and Africa Risen anthologies. He founded Jembefola Press and the Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial
Award For Disability In Speculative Fiction. You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/penprince_

S.R. Ekstein

S.R. Ekstein is an Australian writer and creative. Her works have been published in The Suburban Review, Wildness Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Stone of Madness, and elsewhere. She was previously longlisted for the 2025 Hunter Writers’ Grieve anthology, and is part of the 2026 cohort for The WestWords Academy. She can be found in her local library or @SREwrites on Instagram.

Meg Elison

Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her debut, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise awards finalist. In 2020, she published her first collection, Big Girl with PM Press, containing the Locus Award-winning novelette, “The Pill.” Elison’s first young adult novel, Find Layla was published in 2020 by Skyscape. Her thriller, Number One Fan, will be released by Mira Books in 2022. Meg has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley.

Sigrid Ellis

Sigrid Ellis is co–editor of the Hugo–nominated Queers Dig Time Lords
and Chicks Dig Comics anthologies. She edits the best–selling Pretty
Deadly from Image Comics. She was the flash–fiction editor of Queers
Destroy Science Fiction, from Lightspeed Press. She edited the
Hugo–nominated Apex Magazine for 2014. She lives with her partner,
their two homeschooled children, her partner’s boyfriend, and a host
of vertebrate and invertebrate pets in Saint Paul, MN.