Peter S. Beagle (www.peterbeagle.com) was born in New York in April 1939. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh and graduated with a degree in creative writing in 1959. Beagle won a Seventeen magazine short story contest in his sophomore year, but really began his writing career with his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, in 1960. It was followed by non-fiction travelogue I See by My Outfit in 1961, and by his best-known work, modern fantasy classic The Last Unicorn in 1968. Beagle's other books include novels The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin; collections The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, Giant Bones, The Line Between, and several non-fiction books and a number of screenplays and teleplays. He has a new short novel, I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, coming later this year.
Paul Brandon (www.paulbrandon.com) was born in England in 1971. He studied at the British Film Institute and worked in the film industry for a number of years. He moved to Brisbane, Australia, in 1993 where he works as a writer and musician. His first novel, fantasy Swim the Moon, was published in 2001, and was followed by The Wild Reel in 2004. He plays guitar and bodhran in Celtic-influenced band Súnas, and is currently working on a new novel.
Jack Dann (www.jackdann.com) was born in Binghamton, New York, in February 1945. His first story, "Dark, Dark the Dead Star," appeared in 1970, and was followed by more than seventy books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral—which is an international bestseller—Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine. His short fiction, which includes Nebula Award winner "Da Vinci Rising," has been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, and Jubilee. A prolific editor, he has edited several landmark genre anthologies, including Wandering Stars, In the Field of Fire (with Jeanne Van Buren Dann), and World Fantasy Award winner Dreaming Down-Under (with Janeen Webb). Upcoming is a new collection, Promised Land.
Terry Dowling (www.terrydowling.com) was born in Sydney, New South Wales, in March 1947. A writer, musician, journalist, critic, editor, game designer and reviewer, he has an MA (Hons) in English Literature from the University of Sydney. His Masters thesis discussed J. G. Ballard and Surrealism. He was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia in 2006 for his mystery/dark fantasy/horror novel, Clowns at Midnight, and accompanying dissertation: "The Interactive Landscape: New Modes of Narrative in Science Fiction," in which he examined the computer adventure game as an important new area of storytelling.
He is author of the "Tom Tyson" cycle of stories, collected in Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, and the forthcoming Rynemonn, science fiction story cycle Wormwood, and horror collections An Intimate Knowledge of the Night and World Fantasy Award nominee Blackwater Days. His work has also been collected in career retrospectives Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling and Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear.
Andy Duncan (www.angelfire.com/al/andyduncan/) was born in South Carolina in September 1964. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and creative writing at North Carolina State University, before working as a journalist for the Greensboro News & Record. He currently is the senior editor of Overdrive, a magazine for truck drivers. Duncan's short fiction, which has won the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, is collected in World Fantasy Award winner Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. Duncan also co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic with F. Brett Cox, and edited non-fiction book Alabama Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff. He currently lives with his wife Sydney in Frostburg, Maryland.
Jeffrey Ford (14theditch.livejournal.com/) was born in West Islip, New York, in 1955. He worked as a machinist and as a clammer, before studying English with John Gardner at the State University of New York. He is the author of six novels, including World Fantasy Award winner The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and Edgar Allan Poe Award-winner The Girl in the Glass. His short fiction is collected in World Fantasy Award winning collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories and in The Empire of Ice Cream. His short fiction has won the World Fantasy, Nebula, and Fountain Awards. Upcoming is a new novel, The Shadow Year, which will be published next year, and a new collection, The Night Whiskey. Ford lives in southern New Jersey where he teaches writing and literature.
Kathleen Ann Goonan (www.goonan.com) has been a packer for a moving company, a vagabond, a madrigal singer, a painter of watercolors, and a fiercely omnivorous reader. She has a degree in English and Association Montessori Internationale certification. After teaching for thirteen years, ten of them in her own one-hundred-student school, she began writing. She has published over twenty short stories in venues such as Omni, Asimov's, F&SF, Interzone, SciFi.com, and a host of others. Her Nanotech Quartet includes Queen City Jazz, Mississippi Blues, Crescent City Rhapsody, and Light Music, Crescent City Rhapsody and Light Music were both shortlisted for the Nebula Award. The Bones of Time, shortlisted for the Clarke Award, is set in Hawaii. Her most recent novel is In War Times, and she is presently working on This Shared Dream Called Earth. Her novels and short stories have been published in France, Poland, Russia, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, and Japan. "Literature, Consciousness, and Science Fiction" recently appeared in the Iowa Review online journal. She speaks frequently at various universities about nanotechnology and literature.
Eileen Gunn (www.eileengunn.com) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in June 1945. She grew up near Boston, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Emmanuel College, before working as an advertising copywriter. She moved to California to pursue fiction writing. In 1976 she attended Clarion, then supported herself by working in advertising. She was the 150th employee at Microsoft, where she worked as director of advertising and sales promotion in the 1980s. In 1988 she joined the board of directors for the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and in 2001 began editing online magazine The Infinite Matrix. She currently lives in Seattle with editor John Berry.
Gunn's first short story, "What Are Friends For?", was followed by a handful of others, including Nebula Award winner "Coming to Terms" and Hugo Award nominees "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" and "Computer Friendly." Her short fiction has been collected in Stable Strategies and Others. She is currently working on a biography of Avram Davidson.
Gwyneth Jones (www.boldaslove.co.uk) was born in Manchester, England, in February 1952. She went to convent schools and then took an undergraduate degree in the History of Ideas at the University of Sussex, specializing in seventeenth-century Europe, a distant academic background that still resonates in her work.
She first realised she wanted to be a writer at age fourteen when she won a local newspaper's story competition. She has written a number of highly regarded SF novels, notably White Queen, North Wind, and Phoenix Cafe, and the near-future fantasy "Bold As Love" series. Her collection Seven Tales and a Fable won two World Fantasy Awards, and her critical writings and essays have appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Foundation, NYRSF, and several online venues. She has also written more than twenty novels for teenagers as Ann Halam, starting with Ally, Ally, Aster and including Taylor Five, Dr. Franklin's Island, and most recently Snakehead. She has been writing full time since the early '80s, occasionally teaching creative writing. Honors include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Bold as Love and the Philip K. Dick Award for Life. She lives in Brighton, with her husband, son and two cats called Frank and Ginger; likes cooking, gardening, watching old movies and playing with her websites.
Ellen Klages (www.ellenklages.com) has published more than a dozen stories, including Nebula and Hugo finalist "Time Gypsy," Nebula nominee "Flying Over Water," and 2005 Nebula winner "Basement Magic," all of which are reprinted in her new collection Portable Childhoods (2007). She was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Her first novel, The Green Glass Sea, was short-listed for the Locus Awards and the Quills. It won the Scott O'Dell Award for best American historical fiction. She is currently working on a sequel.
Margo Lanagan (amongamidwhile.blogspot.com) was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, and has a BA in History from Sydney University. She spent ten years as a freelance book editor and currently makes a living as a technical writer. Lanagan wrote teenage romances under various pseudonyms before publishing junior and teenage fiction novels under her own name, including fantasies Wildgame, Tankermen, and Walking through Albert. She has also written an installment in a shared-world YA fantasy series, The Quentaris Chronicles: Treasure Hunters of Quentaris, and three acclaimed original story collections: White Time, World Fantasy Award winner Black Juice, and Red Spikes. She currently lives in Sydney with her partner and their two children where she is working on a new fantasy novel for young adults.
Maureen F. McHugh (my.en.com/~mcq/) was born February 13, 1959. She grew up in Loveland, Ohio, and received a BA from Ohio University in 1981, where she took a creative writing course from Daniel Keyes in her senior year. After a year of grad school there, she went on to get a master's degree in English Literature at New York University in 1984. After several years as a part-time college instructor and miscellaneous jobs in clerking, technical writing, etc., she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China. It was during this period she sold her first story, "All in a Day's Work," which appeared in Twilight Zone. She has written four novels, including Tiptree Award winner and Hugo and Nebula Award finalist China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis. Her short fiction, including Hugo Award winner "The Lincoln Train," was collected in Mothers and Other Monsters which was a finalist for the Story Prize.
Garth Nix (www.garthnix.com) was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in Canberra. When he turned nineteen he left to drive around the UK in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher's sales representative, an editor, a literary agent, and as a public relations and marketing consultant. He was also a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve, but now writes full-time.
His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade's Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, the six-book YA fantasy series "The Seventh Tower," and most recently the seven-book "The Keys to the Kingdom" series. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.
Lucius Shepard (www.lucius-shepard.com) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1947 and published his first book, poetry Cantata of Death, Weakmind & Generation in 1967. He began to publish fiction of genre interest in 1983, with "The Taylorsville Reconstruction," which was followed by such major stories as "A Spanish Lesson," "R&R," "Salvador," and "The Jaguar Hunter." The best of his early short fiction is collected in two World Fantasy Award-winning volumes, The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth. In 1995 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction said of Shepard's relationship to science fiction that "there is some sense that two ships may have passed in the night." Two years later Shepard returned from what he has since described as a career "pause," delivering a series of major short stories, starting with "Crocodile Rock" in 1999, followed by Hugo Award winner "Radiant Green Star" in 2000, and culminating in nearly 300,000 words of short fiction published in 2003. The best of his recent short fiction has been collected in Trujillo and Other Stories, Eternity and Other Stories, and Dagger Key and Other Stories. He has also written the novels Green Eyes, Life During Wartime, Kalimantan, The Golden, Colonel Rutherford's Colt and Floater. His most recent book is new novel Softspoken.
Bruce Sterling (blog.wired.com/sterling) was born in Texas in 1954, and received a BA in Journalism from the University of Texas in 1976. His first short story, "Man Made Self," appeared the same year. His first two novels, Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid, were far-future adventures, the latter presaging the cyberpunk movement he is credited with creating. Sterling edited cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, considered the definitive representation of the subgenre, and his near-future thriller Islands in the Net won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. In 1990 he collaborated with William Gibson on alternate history novel The Difference Engine. Future history novel Schismatrix introduced his Shaper-Mechanist universe, which pits bioengineering against mathematics, also the setting of some of the stories in collection Crystal Express. After writing the non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown, he returned to fiction with near-future, high-tech scenarios in Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Distraction, and The Zenith Angle. Sterling has produced a large and influential body of short fiction, much of which have been collected in Crystal Express, Globalhead, A Good Old-fashioned Future, and Visionary in Residence. His novelette "Bicycle Repairman" won the Hugo Award and novelette "Taklamakan" won the Hugo and the Locus Award. Sterling's non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Nature, Newsday, and Time Digital. A major career retrospective, Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling, will be published in late 2007.
Ysabeau S. Wilce (www.yswilce.com) is a new writer whose first story, "Metal More Attractive," was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2004. Like all of her work to date, it was set in "Alta Califa," an alternate California, and is heavily influenced by Wilce's military history studies. A second story, "The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror," appeared in 2005 and "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" appeared in 2006. Wilce's first novel, a young adult fantasy with a preposterously long title, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, was published to considerable acclaim earlier this year. She currently lives with her husband, a dog, and a large number of well-folded papertowels in Chicago, Illinois, where she is currently working on a second "Flora Segunda" novel.