John M. Shade was born in Central America and grew up all across the U.S. as a Navy brat. He received his B.A. in creative writing from the University of Houston, and his MFA from the University of Southern Maine. He also graduated the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard.

His work has appeared in Gold Dust Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Giganotosaurus, among others. He writes short stories, novels, and comics. He now lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife, daughter, a cat, and a dog, and tries to stay out of the sun’s way when summer comes around.

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Nina Shaharuddin betters the world for a living and does stand-up comedy on the side.

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Mitchell Shanklin lives in Seattle and enjoys writing stories with either magic or made-up science or both. He also writes code for companies (and sometimes for himself). In his free time he plays video, board and mind games, reads, hikes, and has rambling philosophical arguments. (No, not all at the same time. Yet).

He is a proud member of Team Arsenic, the Dreamcrashers, and Write of Passage. You can find him online at http://mitchellshanklin.com

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Heather Shaw is a writer, editor, sewist, bookkeeper, and lindy hopper living in Berkeley, CA with her spouse, and 18-year-old son, River. She’s had short fiction published in Strange Horizons, The Year’s Best Fantasy, Escape Pod, PodCastle, and other nice places. She has been the fiction editor at the erotica zine Fishnet, the speculative fiction zine Flytrap, and the pro-SF zine, Persistent Visions. As a family project during lockdown, Heather, Tim Melody, and their son River designed, created, and successfully Kickstarted a tabletop card game called Cyberwreck. She mostly posts on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/sundew) and Facebook (https://facebook.com/hlshaw).

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Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine, and in anthologies including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and both volumes of the Dark Matterseries.  She was the 2011 Guest of Honor at the feminist SF convention WisCon and a 2014 co-Guest of Honor for the Science Fiction Research Association.  She co-authored the renowned Writing the Other: A Practical Approach with Cynthia Ward, and co-edited the nonfiction anthology Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.  Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair came out in 2016 from Tor Books.

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Delia Sherman lives with her wife and fellow author Ellen Kushner in a rambling apartment in New York City with a lot of books and far too many pieces of paper. She is a social rather than a solitary writer and can work anywhere, which is a good thing because she loves to travel, and if she couldn’t write on airplanes and in cafès, she’d never get anything done.

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Your narrator is the the King of Kitsch, the Sultan of Strangeness, the Odin of Oddity, the Nadir of non­Normalcy, Mr. Norm Sherman. You’ve probably heard Norm over at our sister podcast, Escape Pod, where he is Editor. And if not there, you’ll surely have heard him over on his own podcast, the Drabblecast, strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners, such as yourself. And if not THERE, well, just about anywhere in the genre pod­-o­-sphere.

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William Shunn was born in Los Angeles and raised in Utah, the eldest of eight children in a devout Mormon family. A writer from a young age, he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University in 1985, when he was 17. As was expected, he departed on a proselytizing mission for the LDS Church at the age of 19. He was assigned to preach in Alberta, Canada, but after six months he was convicted of felony mischief in connection with a false bomb threat and expelled from the country. The complete story is recounted in his memoir The Accidental Terrorist, available November 10, 2015. William Shunn left the Mormon Church in 1995 and developed one of the earliest ex-Mormon web sites. He currently lives in New York City.

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Alex Shvartsman is a writer, anthologist, and translator from Brooklyn, NY. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, and other venues. He’s the winner of the 2014 WSFA award and a two-time Canopus award finalist. His debut novel Eridani’s Crown will be released in October 2019. His website is www.alexshvartsman.com.

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