L.X. Beckett

Toronto author and editor L.X. Beckett frittered their youth working as an actor and theater technician in Southern Alberta, before deciding to make a shift into writing science fiction. Their first novella, “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling,” appeared in the July/August issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2018, and takes place in the same universe as their novels Gamechanger and Dealbreaker. Lex identifies as feminist, lesbian, genderqueer, married, and Slytherin. An insatiable consumer of mystery and crime fiction, as well as true crime narratives, they can be found on Twitter at @LXBeckett or at the Lexicon, http://lxbeckett.com.

Julia Watts Belser

Julia Watts Belser is a writer, activist, and academic whose fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Tikkun, and Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly. A professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, she studies gender, sexuality, and disability in classical Jewish texts and writes queer feminist disability theology and ethics. She’s a passionate disability activist, a friend of wild places, and a lover of wheels.

Roxanna Bennett

Roxanna Bennett is a disabled poet living in Whitby, Ontario. She is the author of unseen garden (chapbook, knife | fork | book, 2018) and The Uncertainty Principle (Tightrope Books, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, most recently CV2, Grain, Riddle Fence, PRISM International, Plenitude Magazine, and Tiny Tim Literary Review. Her next book, Unmeaningable, is forthcoming from Gordon Hill Press in fall 2019.

Amy Berg

Amy Berg is a screenwriter and television showrunner. She’s written and produced more than a dozen series, earning a Writers Guild Award nomination and other accolades. She recently ran the critically acclaimed Starz series Counterpart and served as consulting producer on The Alienist,  Warrior Nun, and Jack Ryan. She’s sold numerous pilots, the latest an original spec to Paramount, and has participated in mini-rooms and done uncredited rewrites on several produced video games and feature films. She currently serves as a writer and co-executive producer on Law & Order: Organized Crime.

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom’s short stories, essays, and poems appear or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, The New York Times, Passages North, and elsewhere. They are a queer, chronically ill writer who was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on Monacan land.

Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes is the award-winning author of six novels, a collection of short stories, a pop history about South African women, and New York Times best-selling comics. Her work has been translated into 26 languages and won prizes across genres from the Arthur C. Clarke Award to the Strand Critic’s Choice award and the University of Johannesburg Prize. Her novel, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer and the survivor who turns the hunt around is now a major AppleTV series with Elisabeth Moss. Her latest novel, Bridge, about a young woman’s search for her mother across realities, is out now.

Jana Bianchi

Jana Bianchi is a Brazilian writer, translator, and editor from the countryside of São Paulo currently living in Rio de Janeiro. Her fiction in Portuguese, her native language, has appeared in several Brazilian magazines and anthologies. In English, her work has been published before or is forthcoming at Uncanny, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Fireside, among others. She also attended Clarion West in 2021 and won the BSFA award for best translated shorter fiction from 2023. Together with her partner Diogo Ramos, she runs the Fantástico Guia, an organization that supports Brazilian speculative fiction writers who are writing and submitting their work in English.

Alex Bledsoe

Alex Bledsoe grew up in TN an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty miles from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner. He’s been a reporter, editor, photographer, and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He lives in WI and tries to teach his kids to act like they’ve been to town before. His latest novel is the urban fantasy crime thriller While the City Never Sleeps.

Leah Bobet

Novelist, editor, and critic Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Aurora Awards, been selected for the Ontario Library Association’s Best Bets program, and shortlisted for the Cybils and the Andre Norton Award. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and been transformed into choral work, and is taught in high school and university classrooms in Canada, Australia, and the US. She was guest poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue and her own poetry has appeared in both genre and literary journals through Canada and the United States.

She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds civic engagement spaces, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer is a graduate of Medical Laboratory Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Sixteen Songs of Loss, selected as a finalist by Rita Mookerjee (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023), winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022. Her works has appeared or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Agbowo, The Deadlands, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Canthius, Trampset, and elsewhere. She tweets @ZainabBobi.