I will refrain from referring to myself in third person as I find it a bit neurotic, lame, and even arrogant. I will also keep this brief because I wish to keep the focus on my work and not myself.

I was raised in New Haven, Connecticut. I attended the University of Connecticut for a couple of years but left to marry my husband of twenty years. I have three beautiful children, who like most children these days, far outstrip their parents in intelligence and creativity.

My days, my concrete life, are spent caring for breast oncology patients as a registered nurse. I love working as an oncology nurse. It keeps me grounded and forces me to remember the transient beauty of life, and the importance of doing what one loves while one can. It also keeps God foremost in my mind as I journey through this brief life, that my choices might be according to His will.

My less ordered life (Don’t we all live multiple separate lives?) is spent mostly in my head. I am always attempting to order the multitude of ideas that rise unbidden in my mind when I least expect them. Sometimes the voices of half-formed characters speak to me, begging to be recorded for posterity, that we might learn from them, or them from us.

So, here I am. Here we are. For the present.

K

Sheree Renée Thomas is a NAACP Image Award Nominee and a New York Times-bestselling, award-winning editor, poet, and the author of three short fiction and multigenre collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016, Publishers’ Weekly Starred Review), Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011), and Marvel's Black Panther: Panther's Rage novel (Titan Books, October 11, 2022). Her work is inspired by music, mythology, natural science, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. She is the editor of the groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000, Warner Aspect/Hachette) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004, Warner Aspect/Hachette), the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction, which earned the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards for Year's Best Anthology, making her also the first Black author to win the award since its inception in 1975.

Sheree is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also edited for Random House and for magazines like Apex, Strange Horizons, and is the Associate Editor of the historic Black Arts Movement literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 by Alvin Aubert. As a fiction writer and poet, her work has been supported with fellowships and residencies from Smith College as the Lucille Geier-Lakes Writer-in-Residence, the Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of Arts, VCCA, the Wallace Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, ArtsMemphis, and others. Widely anthologized, her work also appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Anne and Jeff VanderMeer, in several volumes of the Year’s Best anthologies, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, the Rhysling Awards, the Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, volume 1, and in The New York Times. Sheree was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre and served as a Special Guest and a co-host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony in Washington, DC with Andrea Hairston. Thomas also co-curated Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Afrofuturism Festival and served as a narrative writer and consultant on Sony PlayStation and Daimler AG/Mercedes Benz’s futurist video game, Dreams: Imagine Futures whose characters, Eshe, and the AI, Kody are based on her work.

A 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, 2022 World Fantasy Award Finalist, 2022 Ember Award Finalist, 2022 Locus Award Finalist, Ignyte Award Finalist, she is the winner of the 2022 Darrell Award for Year’s Best Novelette (“Madame & the Map: A Journey in Five Movements’ in Nine Bar Blues) and the Dal Colger Memorial Hall of Fame Award. Sheree is a collaborator with Janelle Monáe on "Timebox Altar(ed)" in the New York Times bestselling collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (Harper Voyager, April 18, 2022), and a co-editor of Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight (Tordotcom, November 15, 2022) and Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue with Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins (Third Man Books, January 18, 2022).

Alvaro is a Hugo and Locus award finalist who has published some forty stories and over one hundred reviews, essays and interviews in venues like Clarkesworld, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Locus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, Strange Horizons, Galaxy's Edge, Lackington's, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and anthologies such as The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, Cyber World, Humanity 2.0, This Way to the End Times, 18 Wheels of Science Fiction, Shades Within Us, The Unquiet Dreamer, and Nox Pareidolia

Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He has published over fifty short stories in magazines and anthologies including Analog, Black Static, and Clarkesworld, among others, and his short fiction has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His debut novel THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS is forthcoming in 2023. He blogs at vajra.me and is @_vajra on Twitter.

JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, and The Descent of Monsters, coming July 31st, 2018). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Kitschy awards, and the first two Tensorate novellas made the Tiptree Honor List.

In previous incarnations, they have been a molecular biologist; a writer for animation, comics and games; a journalist for one of Singapore’s major papers, and a science communicator with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

JY works and lives in Singapore. They identify as queer and non-binary. Find them online at http://jyyang.com or on Twitter as @halleluyang.

Emily Stoddard (she/her) is a poet and creative nonfiction writer in Michigan. Her debut poetry book, Divination with a Human Heart Attached, will be released in February 2023 by Game Over Books. It was a finalist for the Orison Poetry Prize, Wren Poetry Prize, and Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.

In 2021, Emily received the Developmental Editing Fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Kenyon Review. Her writing can be found in Tupelo Quarterly, Baltimore Review, Ruminate, Radar, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whitefish Review, and elsewhere. She is a leader and affiliate of the Amherst Writers & Artists Method. Learn more at emilystoddard.com.

Nin Harris is an author, poet, critical theorist and Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, baroque planetary romances and space operas, mythic fantasies and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin's publishing credits include: Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies etc. Nin is a 2016 Rhysling Poetry Award nominee.

Sara Norja dreams in two languages and has a predilection for tea. Born in England and settled in Helsinki, Finland, she lives for words, dance, and moments of wonder. Her poetry has appeared in venues including Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, inkscrawl, Through the Gate, Stone Telling, Interfictions, and the anthology Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (ed. by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. Her short fiction has appeared in various venues including Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and the anthology An Alphabet of Embers (ed. by Rose Lemberg). She blogs at http://suchwanderings.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter as @suchwanderings.

Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the 2022 Hugo Award in the same category. Arkady grew up in New York City, and after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in New Mexico with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. Find her online at arkadymartine.net or on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine.

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