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 over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. Currently, she is the Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence and an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod. She is the author of the ‘Beneath the Rising’ series of novels as well as several novellas.

Cadwell Turnbull is the award-winning author of The Lesson, No Gods, No Monsters and We Are the Crisis. His short fiction has appeared in The Verge, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Asimov’s Science Fiction and several anthologies. His novel The Lesson was the winner of the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award in the debut category. No Gods, No Monsters was the winner of a Lambda, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Manly Wade Wellman Award, and longlisted for the PEN Open Award.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of three novels: The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Technology Review, among others. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Jedediah Berry is the author of The Naming Song, available now from Tor Books. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4.His story in cards, The Family Arcana, was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. His Ennie Award-winning tabletop adventure game setting, The Valley of Flowers, was cowritten with Andrew McAlpine and published by Phantom Mill Games. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts. (Photo credit: Tristan Morgan Chambers)

Gennarose Nethercott is the author of a novel, Thistlefoot, a short fiction collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, and a book-length poem, The Lumberjack’s Dove—which was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. A writer and folklorist alike, she helps create the podcast Lore, and she tours nationally and internationally performing strange tales (sometimes with puppets in tow). She lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery.