Laurel Amberdine

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She read a novel a day for over a decade, until she married someone who occasionally wanted to talk to her, putting an end to that streak.

She currently lives in San Francisco where she works as Assistant Editor at both Locus Magazine and Lightspeed Magazine. She is willing to entertain offers from other magazines that start with “L.”

She has published poetry and short fiction, but loves novels best of all. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing.

Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the Unstoppable trilogy: the first two books, Victories Greater Than Death and Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, are out now, and the final book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, comes out April 11, 2023. She’s also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She’s won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford, and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a trans superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she’s currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Photo Credit: Tristan Crane

Leslie J. Anderson

Leslie is a fiction writer, poet, and artist. In her day job she manages marketing for a healthcare company. She has an unhealthy obsession with lattes and rescuing puppies. Most of her free time is spent removing unsafe things from their mouths. Her collection of poetry, An Inheritance of Stone, was released from Alliteration Ink, and her novel, The Cricket Prophecies, was released by Post Mortem Press. She has two books of writing prompts, Inklings and 100 Prompts for Science Fiction Writers from Sterling Publishing. Leslie graduated from Ohio University with a masters in poetry. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart and a Rhysling Award. Her collection of poetry was nominated for an Elgin Award.

Betsy Aoki

Betsy Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction, 580 Split, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), and anthologized in Climbing Lightly Through Forests (a Ursula K. Le Guin tribute poetry anthology). In 2021 she won the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown.
Her debut poetry collection, Breakpoint, is a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist, and was published in 2022 after winning the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. You can find out more at betsyaoki.com/breakpoint.

Liz Argall

Liz is a science fiction author and cartoonist. You can read her ongoing webcomic for free at thingswithout.com and you can support her making art over at https://www.patreon.com/lizargall

Liz Argall & Kenneth Schneyer

Liz’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She recently cracked the Escape Artists Trifecta! That’s Pseudopod, Podcastle, and soon a story in EscapePod. Liz writes love letters, songs, and poems to inanimate objects, and two of her short stories have become plays that are regularly performed. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and her website is http://lizargall.com/

Ken received a Nebula nomination, and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award, in 2014. Stillpoint Digital Press released his first collection, The Law & the Heart, that same year. His stories appear in Analog, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clockwork Phoenix 3 & 4, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Podcastle, and elsewhere. By day, he teaches legal studies and science fiction literature to undergraduates in Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife, two children, and something with fangs. He and his Clarion classmate Liz Argall wrote the first draft of this story by trading a notebook back and forth in a coffee shop the week after Readercon.

Eleanor Arnason

Eleanor Arnason published her first short story in 1973. Since then she has published six novels, three short story collections, a couple of chapbooks and some poetry. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the James Tiptree Jr. and the Mythopoeic Society Awards; her novel Ring of Swords won a Minnesota Book Award; and her short story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. A collection of her Icelandic fantasies came out in 2014. She has since written four more stories about Icelandic ghosts, trolls, elves and ordinary people. This is one.

Kylie Lee Baker

Kylie Lee Baker is the author of The Keeper of Night duology and the forthcoming The Scarlet Alchemist. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Atlanta, Salamanca, and Seoul. Her work is informed by her heritage (Japanese, Chinese, & Irish) as well as her experiences living abroad as both a student and teacher. She has a BA in creative writing and Spanish from Emory University and is pursuing a master of library and information science degree at Simmons University.

Meghan Ball

Meghan Ball is a writer, editor, and musician. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Tor Nightfire, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, io9.com, and Fireside Fiction. She has also appeared on several podcasts including Caring Into The Void and Black Mass Appeal. When not writing, she listens to an unhealthy amount of music, plays guitar, and does cross stitch. You can find her on twitter @eldritchgirl and discover more of her work at her website eldritchwrites.com. She lives in a weird part of New Jersey.

Nicolette Barischoff

Nicolette Barischoff has spastic cerebral palsy, which has only made her more awesome. She qualified for SFWA with her first three stories, published in Long Hidden, Accessing the Future, and Unlikely Story’s The Journal of Unlikely Academia. Her work has been spoken aloud by the wonderful people of PodCastle, and one of her novelettes is mandatory reading at the University of Texas, Dallas. She edited the personal essays section of Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, which won a Hugo Award. She’s also a fierce advocate for disability and body-positivity, which has occasionally landed her in trouble. She made the front page of CBS New York, who called her activism “public pornography” and suggested her face was a public order crime. She has the exact same chair as Professor X, and it is also powered by Cerebro.