ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Peter M. Ball’s first story was published in Dreaming Again in 2007, and since then his short fiction has appeared in Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Interfictions II, Shimmer, and Year’s Best SF 15. His faerie-noir novella, Horn, was published in 2009 by Twelfth Planet Press, and was followed by Bleed in 2010. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, and can be found online at www.petermball.com.
Damien Broderick is an award-winning Australian SF writer, editor, and critical theorist, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, currently living in San Antonio, Texas, with a PhD from Deakin University. He has published more than forty books, including Reading by Starlight, Transrealist Fiction, x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Unleashing the Strange, and Chained to the Alien: The Best of Australian Science Fiction Review. The Spike was the first full-length treatment of the technological singularity, and Outside the Gates of Science is a study of parapsychology. His 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons (revised in 2009 as The Dreaming) is listed in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. His latest SF novel is the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, written with the aid of a two-year Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and his recent SF collections are Uncle Bones and The Qualia Engine.
Emma Bull published her first short story, “The Rending Dark,” in 1984 in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress. She came to prominence with her next major publication, pioneering urban fantasy novel War for the Oaks, which appeared in 1987. It was followed by five more novels, including Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee Bone Dance, Finder, Freedom & Necessity (with Steven Brust), and most recently Territory. Her short fiction has been collected in Double Feature, a collaborative collection with her husband Will Shetterly. Bull also co-edited the “Liavek” series of fantasy anthologies with Will Shetterly, and currently is executive producer and one of the writers for Shadow Unit (www.shadowunit.org).
Andy Duncan was born in South Carolina. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and worked as a journalist for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., before studying creative writing at North Carolina State University and the University of Alabama, and serving as 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. Upcoming is a new short story collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. He currently lives with his wife, Sydney, in Frostburg, Maryland, where both teach in the English department of Frostburg State University.
Jeffrey Ford was born in West Islip, New York. 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 seven novels, including The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His fiction has won the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Fountain Award, Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Ford lives in southern New Jersey where he teaches writing and literature at Brookdale Community College.
Eileen Gunn was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and grew up outside Boston. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Emmanuel College.In 1976,she attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in Michigan, then supported herself by writing advertising and books about computers. She was an early employee at Microsoft, where she was director of advertising and sales promotion in the mid-1980s. She left in 1985 to continue writing fiction. She lives in Seattle with the typographer and editor John D. Berry. Gunn’s first short story, “What Are Friends For?” was published in 1978; subsequent stories include Nebula Award winner “Coming to Terms” and Hugo Award nominees “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” and “Computer Friendly.” Her short fiction collection Stable Strategies and Others was published by Tachyon Publications in 2004, and was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., and World Fantasy awards. She is currently working on a biography of Avram Davidson.
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born writer who lives in Canada. Her novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, and The New Moon’s Arms. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the World Fantasy Award, and a two-time winner of Canada’s Sunburst Award for the Literature of the Fantastic. She doesn’t know whether she believes in ghosts or not, but she fervently hopes that if they do exist, they’re not trapped in the Mega-Mall Between Life and Death.
Kij Johnson sold her first short story in 1987, and has subsequently appeared regularly in Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. She has won the Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Crawford Award. Her short story “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” was nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon awards. Her story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Hugo awards, and won the World Fantasy Award, while science fiction short story “Spar” won the 2009 Nebula Award.
Her novels include World Fantasy Award nominee The Fox Woman and Fudoki. She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan.
Gwyneth Jones was born in Manchester, England, and is the author of more than twenty novels for teenagers, mostly under the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded SF novels for adults. She has won two World Fantasy Awards, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and shared the first Tiptree Award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. Her most recent books are novel Spirit and essay collection Imagination/Space. Upcoming is new story collection The Universe of Things. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband and son, a Tonkinese cat called Ginger, and her young friend Milo.
James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. His most recent book is a collection of stories entitled The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories. His short novel Burn won the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award in 2007. He has won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice: in 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur,” and in 2000, for his novelette “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of The Secret History of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and on the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation. He produces two podcasts: James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible and the Free Reads Podcast.
Caitlín R. Kiernan was born in Dublin, Ireland, but grew up in rural Alabama. She studied vertebrate paleontology, geology, and biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She then taught evolutionary biology in Birmingham for about a year. Her first short story, “Persephone,” appeared in 1995. Since then, her fiction has been collected in ten volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, With Love; A is for Alien; and, most recently in The Ammonite Violin and Others. Her stories include International Horror Guild Award winners “Onion” and “La Peau Verte,” SF novella The Dry Salvages, and IHG finalists “The Road of Pins” and “Bainbridge”. Kiernan’s first novel, IHG Award winner and Stoker finalist Silk, was followed by Threshold, The Five of Cups, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, and World Fantasy Award nominee The Red Tree. Upcoming is major new collection, Two Worlds and in Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan. Kiernan now lives in Providence, Rhode Island where she is working on a new novel.
Michael Swanwick’s first two short stories were published in 1980, and both featured on the Nebula ballot that year. One of the major writers working in the field today, he has been nominated for at least one of the field’s major awards in almost every successive year, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Locus awards. He has published six collections of short fiction, seven novels—In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel—and a Hugo Award nominated book-length interview with editor Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is major career retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick. Upcoming is a new “Darger and Surplus” novel, Dancing with Bears.
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, and Fantasy Magazine. Her story “Eros, Philia, Agape” was nominated for the 2009 Hugo and Sturgeon awards, while “A Memory of Wind” was a 2010 Nebula Award nominee. Her most recent book is a Through the Drowsy Dark, a short collection of feminist poems and short stories. She lives in Bakersfield, California, with her husband and two cats, and is seriously considering whether or not to become a crazy cat lady by adopting all four stray kittens which were recently born in her yard.
Jo Walton is a British fantasy and science fiction writer who makes her home in Canada. Her first published novel was The King’s Peace, followed by The King’s Name. In 2002 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and subsequently published two more fantasy novels, The Prize in the Game and World Fantasy Award winner Tooth and Claw. She then went on to publish her “Small Change” trilogy—Farthing, Ha’penny, Half a Crown; and Lifelode. Her most recent novel is Among Others. She lives with her son and husband in Montreal, Quebec.