John C. Wright is a retired attorney, newspaperman and newspaper editor, who was only once on the lam and forced to hide from the police who did not admire his newspaper.

In 1984, Graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, home of the "Great Books" program. In 1987, he graduated from the College and William and Mary's Law School (going from the third oldest to the second oldest school in continuous use in the United States), and was admitted to the practice of law in three jurisdictions (New York, May 1989; Maryland December 1990; DC January 1994). His law practice was unsuccessful enough to drive him into bankruptcy soon thereafter. His stint as a newspaperman for the St. Mary's Today was more rewarding spiritually, but, alas, also a failure financially. He presently works (successfully) as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children: Pingping, Orville, Wilbur, and Just Wright.

John Grant is the author of more than seventy books, including the critically acclaimed Discarded Science, Corrupted Science, and Bogus Science. In addition to his popular science writing, Grant is a prolific science fiction and fantasy writer. He has won two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and a number of other international literary awards. He coedited with John Clute The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and wrote all three editions of The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters; both encyclopedias are standard reference works in their field. Under his real name, Paul Barnett, he has written several books and run the world-famous fantasy-art-book imprint Paper Tiger, for this latter work winning a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award. For more on this prolific author, see www.johngrantpaulbarnett.com.

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for inspiration. She has recently misapplied her professors' hard work to the short novel DRIFTWOOD and TURNING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT, a sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent. The first book of that series, A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her other works include the Doppelganger duology, the urban fantasy Wilders series, the Onyx Court historical fantasies, the Varekai novellas, and nearly sixty short stories, as well as the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides. Together with Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, she is the author of the upcoming Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with THE MASK OF MIRRORS in January 2021. For more information, visit swantower.com, Twitter @swan_tower, or her Patreon at www.patreon.com/swan_tower.

Author and video game designer Erin Hoffman was born in San Diego and now lives in northern California, where she works as Game Design Lead at the GlassLab, a nonprofit video game studio building big-data-powered educational games that digitally adapt to the learner. She is the author of the Chaos Knight series from Pyr books, beginning with Sword of Fire and Sea, followed by Lance of Earth and Sky and concluding with Shield of Sea and Space. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Tor.com, and more. For more information, visit www.erinhoffman.com and twitter @gryphoness.

Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning Australian author, editor and artist. Former fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine, she has also dabbled as an assistant library technician, media monitor, political and archaeological photographer, graphic designer, guest lecturer, festival director, panellist, fiction judge, essayist, creative writing teacher and manager of Agog! Press, which produced ten anthologies of new speculative fiction.

Cat has a BA in visual arts (CAI), a postgraduate certificate in editing and publishing (UTS) and a PhD in creative writing (Curtin), the latter concerning the intersection of ecocatastrophe science fiction and contemporary climate fiction.

Other career highlights include studying with Margaret Atwood, 73 published short stories, two collections – The Bride Price (2013) and Dark Harvest (2020) and a far future novel, Lotus Blue (2017), which was funded by an Australia Council emerging writers grant.

Cat is a keen traveller currently obsessed with photographing cheeky parrots and grungy walls.

www.catsparks.net

Deborah Biancotti is an Australian writer. She is a co-author for the ZEROES trilogy and the author of BAD POWER, WAKING IN WINTER and A BOOK OF ENDINGS.

Her short stories have appeared in CLOCKWORK PHOENIX, EXOTIC GOTHIC, EIDOLON 1, Ideomancer, infinity plus, Prime Publishing's YEAR'S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR, as well as local collections: AUSTRALIAN DARK FANTASY AND HORROR, and YEAR'S BEST AUSTRALIAN FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. She also has an essay in TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GOTHIC.

Her work has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award, the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book.

Greetings! I'm Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran. I hold B.A. in Celtic Studies from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Maine, and a PhD in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. I'm also an author, poet, and musician under the name C.S. MacCath. My long-running Folklore & Fiction Project integrates these passions with a focus on folklore scholarship aimed at storytellers, and I bring a deep appreciation of animism, ecology, and folkloristics to my own storytelling. You can find me online at (csmaccath dot com) and (folkloreandfiction dot com).

Joanna Galbraith was born in Australia but has spent chunks of her life in countries as varied as Switzerland and Syria, Turkey and Italy. She currently lives in San Miniato, Italy where she enjoys writing slightly skewered stories and patting other people's pets. You can visit her at http://www.joannagalbraith.com/

Mike Allen is an author, editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-eight books, among them his forthcoming dark fantasy novel TRAIL OF SHADOWS and his new horror collection SLOW BURN.

UNSEAMING and AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT, his first two volumes of horror tales, were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Story Collection, and his dark fable “The Button Bin” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Another collection, THE SPIDER TAPESTRIES, contains experiments in weird science fiction and fantasy. His dark fantasy novel THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO combines sword and sorcery with a zombie apocalypse.

As an editor and publisher, he has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award: first, for his anthology CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5, the culmination of the Clockwork Phoenix series showcasing tales of beauty and strangeness that defy genre classification; and then, for MYTHIC DELIRIUM, the magazine of poetry and fiction he edited for twenty years.

He’s a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. His six poetry collections include STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD, a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice selection, and HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS, a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee.

With his wife, Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books, based in Roanoke, Virginia. Their cat Pandora assists.

Find him on Instagram and on BlueSky via his mythicdelirium handle.