Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She studied at the University of Massachusetts and University of Kansas, edited small press magazines Shayol and Chacal, and published her first story in 1980. One of the most important writers of the cyberpunk movement, she is the author of sixteen books, including debut novel Mindplayers, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winners Synners and Fools, as well as two nonfiction movie books on the making of The Mummy and Lost in Space, five media tie-ins, and one young adult novel, Avatars. Her short fiction is collected in Locus Award-winner Patterns, Dirty Work, Home by the Sea, and Letters from Home. She currently lives in London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler.

Paul Di Filippo sold his first story in 1977. Since then he's had several hundred short stories published, the majority of them collected in his dozen short story collections. He has written nine novels, including Fuzzy Dice and Spondulix. His most recent books are novel Roadside Bodhisattva, collection Harsh Oases, and short illustrated novel Cosmocopia. He is currently working, at last (!), on A Princess of the Linear Jungle, a sequel to his multiple award-nominated novella A Year in the Linear City. He lives in his native state, Rhode Island, amidst eldritch Lovecraftian surroundings, with his mate of thirty years, Deborah Newton, a chocolate cocker spaniel named Brownie, and a three-colored cat named Penny Century.

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, Grand 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.

Karen Joy Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana and attended the University of California at Berkeley between 1968 and 1972, graduating with a BA in Political Science, and then earning an MA at UC Davis in 1974. She published her first science fiction story, "Praxis," in 1985 and has won the Nebula Award for stories "What I Didn't See" and "Always." Her short fiction has been collected in Artificial Things and World Fantasy Award-winner Black Glass. Fowler is also the author of five novels, including debut Sarah Canary (described by critic John Clute as one of the finest First Contact novels ever written), Sister Noon, The Sweetheart Season, and Wit's End. She is probably best known, though, for her novel The Jane Austen Book Club, which was adapted into a successful film. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, with husband Hugh Sterling Fowler II. They have two grown children.

Molly Gloss was born in Portland, Oregon, and studied at Portland State College (now University). She worked as a schoolteacher and a correspondence clerk for a freight company before becoming a full-time writer in 1980. In 1981, she took a course in science fiction writing from Ursula K. Le Guin at Portland State University. Her first short story, "The Doe," was published that same year, and was followed by a dozen more, including Hugo and Nebula Award-nominee "Lambing Season." Her first novel Outside the Gates appeared in 1986, and was followed by The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, and The Hearts of Horses. Wild Life was a James Tiptree Jr. Award-winner. In addition, she has won the 1990 Ken Kesey Award for the Novel, the 1996 Whiting Writers Award, as well as the PEN Center West Fiction Prize. Gloss has also written book reviews, essays, an appreciation of Ursula K. Le Guin, and an introduction to the memoir of a woman homesteader. Molly Gloss lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women's self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the U.S. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be "in the National Interest" for her to live and work in this country. This didn't thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country's declining moral standards.

In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place, (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007). She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction published by Overlook. Her non-fiction has appeared in a variety of print and web journals, including Out, Nature, and The Huffington Post. Her awards include the Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times). Her latest book is a memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life. She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, and takes enormous delight in everything.

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 nine volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; and, most recently, A Is for Alien. 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, and Daughter of Hounds. Upcoming is major new novel The Red Tree and short story collection The Ammonite Violin & Others. Kiernan now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Ellen Klages was born in Columbus, Ohio, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, but left in her sophomore year, spending time as a camp counselor and working at a book factory, then returned to college, graduating from the University of Michigan with a philosophy degree. She wrote for San Francisco science museum Exploratorium, collaborating with Pat Murphy and others on a series of science books for children, beginning with The Science Explorer. Klages's first story, "Time Gypsy," appeared in 1998 and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards. It was followed by a dozen more, including Nebula nominee "Flying Over Water," and Nebula winner "Basement Magic" (2003), most of which were collected in World Fantasy Award-finalist Portable Childhoods. She was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Klages is the author of two novels, The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O'Dell Award for Best American Historical Fiction, and sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California Book Award for YA Fiction.

Ellen Kushner was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated from Barnard College. After graduating, she found a job in publishing at Ace Books as a fantasy editor, and then went on to edit fiction at Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster. Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, introduced the fantasy world Riverside, to which she has since returned in The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), The Privilege of the Sword, and several short stories. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Kushner is also the editor of Basilisk and The Horns of Elfland (co-edited with Don Keller and Delia Sherman), and has taught writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops. Upcoming is an anthology of "Bordertown" stories co-edited with Holly Black. Kushner is perhaps best known in the U.S. as the host of the national public radio show Sound & Spirit, a musical exploration of world myth, spirituality and the human experience, and as the creator of The Golden Dreydl, which uses music from Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" to tell a Hanukkah story, in collaboration with the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra. Kushner lives in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, with her partner, the author and editor Delia Sherman.