Tananarive Due

TANANARIVE DUE (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is 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 “The Twilight Zone” on CBS All Access. 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 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 is married to author Steven Barnes, with whom she collaborates on screenplays. They live with their son, Jason, and two cats.

David Brin

David Brin is best-known for shining light — plausibly and entertainingly — on technology, society, and countless challenges confronting our rambunctious civilization. His best-selling novels include The Postman (filmed in 1997) plus explorations of our near-future in Earth and Existence. Other novels are translated into 25+ languages. His short stories explore vividly speculative ideas.

Brin’s nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the American Library Association’s Freedom of Speech Award for exploring 21st Century concerns about security, secrecy, accountability and privacy.

As a scientist, tech-consultant and world-known author, he speaks, advises, and writes widely on topics from national defense and homeland security to astronomy and space exploration, SETI and nanotechnology, future/prediction, creativity, and philanthropy. Urban Developer Magazine named him one of four World’s Best Futurists, and he was appraised as “#1 influencer” in Onalytica’s Top 100 report of Artificial Intelligence influencers, brands & publications.

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. His most recent books are a collection, The Promise of Space (2018), from Prime Books.and a novel, Mother Go (2017), an audiobook original from Audible.

In 2016 Centipede Press published a career retrospective Masters of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly. His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel, he has co-edited five anthologies. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s. Coming in January 2020, King Of The Dogs, Queen Of The Cats, a novella from Subterranean Press. Find him on the web at www.jimkelly.net.

Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the novel Autonomous, nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. They were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Their new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, comes out September 2019

Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi is a multi-award winning and internationally bestselling author. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award and winning the Micheal L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

Paolo’s work often focuses on questions of sustainability and the environment, most notably the various impacts of climate change. He has written novels for adults, young adults, and children, and is currently at work on a new novel. He lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son.

Caroline M. Yoachim

Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus, and multiple Nebula Awards, and her stories have been reprinted in multiple year’s best anthologies and translated into several languages. Yoachim’s debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out in 2016.

Photo Credit: Ruth Marie Photography

Justin C. Key

Justin C. Key is a speculative fiction writer, psychiatrist, and a graduate of Clarion West 2015. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Escape Pod, and Interstellar Flight Magazine. He is currently working on a near-future novel inspired by his medical training. His horror novella, Spider King, is available now from Serial Box. When Justin isn’t writing, working in the hospital, or exploring Los Angeles with his wife, he’s chasing after his two young (and energetic!) sons and marveling over his newborn daughter.

Alex Shvartsman

Alex Shvartsman is the author Eridani’s Crown. He’s the winner of the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and a two-time finalist (2015 and 2017) for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing.

His short stories have appeared in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and a variety of other magazines and anthologies. His previously published books include collections Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and The Golem of Deneb Seven, as well as his steampunk humor novella H. G. Wells, Secret Agent. 

In addition to the UFO series, he has edited The Cackle of Cthulhu, Humanity 2.0, Funny Science Fiction, Coffee: Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic, and Dark Expanse: Surviving the Collapse anthologies. 

His website is www.alexshvartsman.com

Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu

Congyun (a.k.a Mu Ming) Gu is a new Chinese speculative fiction writer and also a software engineer at Google, currently living in New York. She has published short stories and novellas in multiple Chinese science fiction online platforms, anthologies and magazines since 2016. She has been selected as the finalists of Douban Read’s Writing Competitions three times since 2016, with 2 of them awarded in 2017 and 2018. Her novelette won the 1st prize in the 2018 Future Sci-Fi Masters Writing Contest in China and was also included the Best of the Year 2018 Chinese SF anthology. She is also nominated for the Best New Writer in the forthcoming 2019 Chinese Xingyun(Nebula) Award. Select stories can be read in English and (forthcoming) Italian  translation. She can be found in twitter congyun@ and on her website: https://congyungu.wordpress.com/

Sally Wiener Grotta

Sally Wiener Grotta’s books include The Winter Boy (a Locus Magazine’s 2015 Recommended Read) and Jo Joe (a Jewish Book Council Network book).  Her story “One Widow’s Healing” won a 2019 Health Odyssey award from Thomas Jefferson Hospital. Her hundreds of stories, columns and essays have appeared in scores of publications.  Her far-ranging experiences as a journalist to all corners of the world flavor her tales with a sense of wonder, otherliness and common sense. Sally is co-curator of the Galactic Philadelphia author reading series and co-chair of The Authors Guild Philadelphia Chapter. (SallyWienerGrotta.com)