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 Sunday Times bestselling author of dark fantasy and horror novels such as The Keeper of Night, The Scarlet Alchemist, and Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Atlanta, Salamanca, and Seoul. Her writing is informed by her heritage (Japanese, Chinese, and 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 a MS in library and information science degree from 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.

Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer, artist, and translator in London, whose work has been presented extensively, in fifteen countries. She was Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-In-Residence, and is Researcher-in-Residence at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute. Among Okka’s honours, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow and is a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change. Okka is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches), author-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis; Vietnamese translation published by AJAR Press), and author of debut poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches Press).

Photo Credit: Derrick Kakembo

Natania Barron

The award-winning fantasy author of the feminist Arthurian retelling, Queen of None, Natania Barron is preoccupied with mythology, monsters, mayhem, and magic. From medieval tales to Regency fantasy romance, her often historically-inspired novels are lush with description and vibrant characters.

Natania holds a BA in English/Writing from Loyola University Maryland and an MA in English with a concentration in medieval literature from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Though she left academia physically, she’s never stopped researching. Natania can regularly be found deep in the tomes of digitized illuminated manuscripts from around the world.

On Twitter, she’s known for her #ThreadTalks, which dive deep into the unseen world of fashion history–one of her favorite topics–as well as a meme or two. She identifies bisexual and demisexual, and goes by she/her/they pronouns. When not traveling through imagined worlds, she lives in North Carolina with her family, where she traipses through the forest on a regular basis, bakes incessantly, drinks an inordinate amount of tea, and dreams of someday owning a haunted house of her own.

Christopher Barzak

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award–winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the major motion picture, Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and James Tiptree Jr. Awards. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, and Before and Afterlives, which won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. Christopher grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, was recently published by Knopf. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University. Learn more about Chris at christopherbarzak.com

Amelia Beamer

Amelia Beamer’s biggest contribution to literature thus far is horny zombies: Barnes & Noble called her debut novel The Loving Dead one of the top genre novels of the past decade. She is at work on new novels and lives in Chicago after several years abroad doing things like riding horses across lava fields in Iceland and driving on the other side of the car in Australia.

Photo Credit: 8Eyes Photography

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of around 30 novels and over a hundred short stories.