Tochi Onyebuchi

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Goliath. His previous fiction includes Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award; the Beasts Made of Night series; and the War Girls series. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and elsewhere. His nonfiction includes the book (S)kinfolk and has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places.

Photo by Christina Orlando

Praise Osawaru

Praise Osawaru (he/him) is a writer of Bini descent. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Nina Riggs Poetry Award nominee; his work appears in Agbowó, FIYAH, Frontier Poetry, Down River Road, The Maine Review, and Savant-Garde, among others. He’s the first-place winner of the 2021 Valiant Scribe Poetry Prize, the second-place winner of the Nigerian NewsDirect Poetry Prize 2020, and a finalist for the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, & the 2021 Dan Veach Prize For Younger poets. He’s a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine and a reader for Chestnut Review. Find him on Instagram & Twitter: @wordsmithpraise.

Emma Osborne

Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem: Tales of the Macabre and Twisted, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and GlitterShip. Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop (Team Arsenic forever!) and is a former first reader at Clarkesworld Magazine. Emma currently lives in Melbourne, drinking all of the coffee and eating all of the food, but has a giant crush on Seattle and turns up under the shadow of the mountain at every opportunity. You can find Emma on Twitter at @redscribe.

Karen Osborne

Karen Osborne lives in Baltimore, MD, with two violins, an autoharp, a theremin, three cameras, a husband, and a bonkers orange cat. Her short fiction appears in Escape Pod, Robot Dinosaurs, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, and Uncanny. Her debut novel, Architects of Memory, will be published in 2020 by Tor. She emcees the Charm City Spec reading series, plays the fiddle in a ceilidh band, and once won a major event filmmaking award for shooting and editing a Klingon wedding trailer. You can find her on Twitter at @karenthology.

Mark Oshiro

What if you could re–live the experience of reading a book (or watching a show) for the first time? Mark Oshiro provides just such a thing on a daily basis on Mark Reads and Mark Watches, where he chronicles his unspoiled journey through various television and book series. Since 2009, Mark has been subjecting himself to the emotional journey that one takes when they enter a fictional world for the first time. He mixes textual analysis, confessional blogging, and humor to analyze fiction that usually makes him cry and yell on camera. All of this earned Mark a Hugo Award nomination in the Fan Writer category in 2013 and 2014, and he has no plans on stopping. He was the nonfiction editor of Queers Destroy Science Fiction! and the co–editor of Speculative Fiction 2015. He is the President of Con or Bust, a non–profit that helps fans of color attend SFF conventions. His first novel, a YA contemporary about police brutality, is in need of an agent and will make you feel lots of things. His life goal: to pet every dog in the world.

Anya Ow

Anya Ow is the author of Ion Curtain, The Firebird’s Tale, and Cradle and Grave, and is an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, the 2019 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror anthology, and more. Born in Singapore, Anya has a Bachelor of Laws from Melbourne University and a Bachelor of Applied Design from Billy Blue College of Design. She lives in Melbourne with her two cats, working as a graphic designer, illustrator, and chief studio dog briber for a creative agency. She can be found at anyasy.com or on twitter @anyasy.

Greg Pak

Greg Pak is a writer and filmmaker best known for his feature film Robot Stories and for writing over 550 comic books, including classic series like Planet Hulk, Darth Vader, Mech Cadet Yu, and Ronin Island. He wrote The Princess Who Saved Herself, the beloved children’s book based on the song by Jonathan Coulton, and recently released I Belong to You / Motherland, an illustrated book of poetry set to music by Inversion Ensemble. Pak co-created the Marvel characters Amadeus Cho with artist Takeshi Miyazawa and Wave with artist Leinil Yu. For more, please visit gregpak.com.

Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer’s acclaimed Terra Ignota series (Tor Books) explores a future of borderless nations and globally commixing populations; its fourth and last volume Perhaps the Stars is due out September 2021. She teaches history at the University of Chicago, studying the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and radical freethought, and is currently working on a book on censorship and the impact of information revolutions on censorship methods. She composes music including the Viking mythology cycle Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, studies anime/manga, especially Osamu Tezuka, post-WWII manga and feminist manga, consults for anime and manga publishers, and blogs at ExUrbe.com.

Ada Palmer and Jo Walton

Ada Palmer’s acclaimed Terra Ignota series (Tor Books) explores a future of borderless nations and globally commixing populations; its fourth and last volume Perhaps the Stars is due out September 2021. She teaches history at the University of Chicago, studying the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and radical freethought, and is currently working on a book on censorship and the impact of information revolutions on censorship methods. She composes music including the Viking mythology cycle Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, studies anime/manga, especially Osamu Tezuka, post-WWII manga and feminist manga, consults for anime and manga publishers, and blogs at ExUrbe.com.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer who has published four poetry collections, two collections of nonfiction pieces, one short story collection, and fifteen novels, most recently Or What You Will. She won the World Fantasy Award in 2004 for Tooth and Claw and the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012 for Among Others. She blogs about older science fiction on Tor.com. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are much better. She likes reading, writing, travel, live theatre, and science fiction conventions, and is finding this pandemic exceedingly trying.

Eva Papasoulioti

Eva Papasoulioti is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry. She lives in Athens, Greece, and translates words for a living. Her work has appeared in Syntax & Salt, Abyss & Apex, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. You can find her on twitter @epapasoulioti and on her blog plothopes.com.