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.
Maureen F. McHugh was born in Loveland, Ohio. She received a B.A. from Ohio University in 1981, where she took a creative writing course from Daniel Keyes in her senior year. After several years as a part-time college instructor, she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China. It was during this period she sold her first story, "All in a Day's Work," which appeared in Twilight Zone. She has written four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner and Hugo and Nebula Award nominee China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis. Her short fiction, including Hugo Award-winner "The Lincoln Train," was collected in Mothers and Other Monsters, which was a finalist for the Story Prize. She is currently a partner at No Mimes Media, an Alternate Reality Game company, and was a writer and/or managing editor for numerous projects, including Year Zero and I Love Bees.
Nnedi Okorafor was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of Illinois, C-U in 1996 and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University in 1999. She attended the University of Illinois in Chicago, getting her MA in English in 2002 and completing her PhD in 2007. She is the author of the novels The Shadow Speaker and Zahrah the Windseeker, winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Zahrah the Windseeker was also shortlisted for the 2005 Carl Brandon Parallax and Kindred awards and a finalist for the Garden State Teen Book Award and the Golden Duck Award. The Shadow Speaker was a Booksense Pick for Winter 2007/08, a Tiptree Honor Book, a finalist for the Essence Magazine Literary Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the Golden Duck Award and an NAACP Image Award nominee. Her children's book, Long Juju Man, won the 2007/08 Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa. Forthcoming are her young adult novel Akata Witch and her adult fantasy Who Fears Death. She is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University and lives with her family in Illinois.
Jane Yolen is the award-winning author of more than 300 books, mostly written for children. She is also a professional storyteller on the stage, has been an editor, and is the mother of three grown children, and the grandmother of six. Her best-known work, the critically acclaimed Owl Moon (illustrated by John Schoenherr) won the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1988. Her fiction has won the Christopher Medal (twice) the Nebula (twice), World Fantasy Award, Society of Children's Book Writers (twice), Mythopoeic Society's Aslan (three times), Boys' Clubs of America Junior Book Award, and she had a National Book Award finalist. Six colleges have given her honorary doctorates. Her works for adults include the powerful holocaust fantasy Briar Rose, and the "Great Alta" trilogy. Some of her short fiction has been collected in Once upon a Time (She Said). She lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and St Andrews, Scotland.
Adam Stemple was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The son of Jane Yolen and her late husband David Stemple, he is a writer and professional musician. A member of Irish band Tim Malloys, he has written four novels, including Pay the Piper (written with Jane Yolen), and a number of short stories.
