Ellen Kushner unites her talents and insights as a writer, performer, and cultural maven in one sleek package: she is the author of acclaimed works of literary fantasy, an award-winning audio book narrator and stage performer, the creator and former host of public radio’s national series Sound & Spirit, and a popular teacher and lecturer.
Henry Kuttner (7th April 1915 – 4th February 1958) was the author of many sci-fi and fantasy short stories in The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. He was one of the “Lovecraft Circle”, and contributed a number of elements to the Cthulhu Mythos.
Some of Kuttner and Moore’s works have been adapted for film. Their short story “The Twonky” was filmed in 1953, while “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” was adapted into “The Last Mimzy” in 2007. Their “What You Need” was adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone. Kutter’s “The Graveyard Rats” was adapted as a segment of Trilogy of Terror II and an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
Kuttner is not as well known as many of his contemporaries, mostly due to his death at the relatively young age of 42.
Aimee Kuzenski writes and narrates fiction. She went to school for both acting and electrical engineering and has trained in Filipino Martial Arts for the past eight years. She currently lives in Minneapolis, MN with a hairless cat named Beatrice.
You can find her online at www.akuzenski.com and on Twitter @aimeekuzenski.
Greye La Spina (1880–1969), née Bragg, was one of the most popular writers in the 1920s and early 1930s for Weird Tales, for which she wrote very creepy short stories and serialized four novels: Invaders from the Dark (1925), The Gargoyle (1925), Fettered (1926), and The Portal to Power (1930–1931).
Born to a Methodist minister in Wakefield, Massachusetts, she married in 1898 and had a daughter two years later; her husband died the following year. She remarried in 1910 to Robert La Spina, Barone di Savuto, who was descended from Russian aristocracy. She became a news photographer (one of the first women in the profession), was a typist for other writers, and became a master weaver, winning prizes for her tapestries and rugs.
Her writing career began early when she produced her own newspaper at the age of ten, publishing her poems and local gossip and selling copies to her neighbors. While still a teenager, she won a literary contest and saw her story published in Connecticut Magazine. Her first story in the supernatural area was a werewolf tale, “Wolf of the Steppes,” which she sent to Popular Magazine, a general interest pulp. When Street & Smith started a new pulp devoted to weird and supernatural fiction, her story was selected as the lead story of the first issue of Thrill Book (March 1, 1919). She wrote several more stories for the short-lived magazine, both under her own name and a pseudonym; her work appeared in the last issue as well. She wrote for many other magazines after that, both as Greye La Spina and Isra Putnam, including the prestigious Black Mask, All-Story, Action Stories, Ten-Story Book, and Weird Tales, where her career flourished. Her only book did not appear until 1960, when Arkham House published a hardcover edition of her werewolf novel, Invaders from the Dark.
Mur Lafferty is the co-editor and sometime-host of Escape Pod.
She is an American podcaster and writer based in Durham, North Carolina. She is the host and creator of the podcasts I Should Be Writing and Ditch Diggers. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Scribe Awards. In the past decade she has been the co-founder/co-editor of PseudoPod, founding editor of Mothership Zeta, and the editor or co-editor of Escape Pod (where she is currently).
She is fond of Escape Artists, in other words.
Mur won the 2013 Astounding Award for Best New Writer (formerly the John W. Campbell Award), and the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Fancast for Ditch Diggers. She’s been nominated for numerous other awards and is always doing new things, so check her website for the latest.
Julia LaFond got her master’s in geoscience from Penn State University. She primarily writes SFF and horror, and her short fiction has been published via venues such as Creepy Podcast, Air & Nothingness Press, and Worlds of Possibility. In her spare time, Julia enjoys reading and gaming.
Kim Lakin-Smith is a Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy author. Kim’s short stories feature in Interzone, Black Static, Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, Best British Fantasy 2013, Sharkpunk, The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, and more. She is the author of gothic science fantasy, Tourniquet, and YA novels, Queen Rat and Autodrome. Her novel, Cyber Circus, was shortlisted for both the BSFA Best Novel and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel 2012. With a background in dance and performance, she has narrated stories for Dark Fiction Magazine, Word Punk, Tales to Terrify, PseudoPod, and, of course, PodCastle! Follow her on Twitter @theginfairy.
Brent Lambert is a Black, queer man who heavily believes in the transformative power of speculative fiction across media formats. He resides in San Diego but spent a lot of time moving around as a military brat. His family roots are in the Cajun country of Louisiana. Currently, he manages the social media for FIYAH Literary Magazine, worked as Senior Programming Coordinator for FIYAHCON, and co- produced with Tor.com an anthology titled Breathe FIYAH. He has work published with FIYAH, Anathema Magazine, Cotton Xenomorph, Baffling Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He can be found on Twitter @brentclambert talking about the weird and the fantastic. Ask him his favorite members of the X-Men and you’ll get different answers every time.
Marshal Latham is known around Escape Artists as Swamp and runs the podcast Journey Into…
Doretta Lau is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? (Nightwood Editions, 2014), which was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award, longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2014. In 2013, she was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She completed an MFA in Writing at Columbia University. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Day One, Event, Grain Magazine, Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Ricepaper, Room Magazine, sub-TERRAIN, and Zen Monster. Doretta splits her time between Vancouver and Hong Kong, where she is writing a comedic novel about an inept company struggling to open a theme park about death and an essay collection about navigating volcanoes, illness, and other enormities on the worst timeline. She is the cofounder of an editorial and marketing services company Start to Finish Agency.
Photo credit: Ming Kai Leung.