J.H. Siegal writes prose, poetry, music, and code. He plays barrelhouse piano and produces the musical group Red Spot Rhythm Section. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and Skeptic Magazine, among others. Currently, he is at work on his first novel. He lives with his wife and two children near Chicago, IL.
Amy Sisson is a writer, reviewer, librarian, and crazy cat lady. Her work – including the “Mr. Featherbottom” series – has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including Abyss & Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Toasted Cake, and PodCastle.
Cory Skerry lives in the Northwest U.S. in a spooky old house that he doesn’t like to admit is haunted. When he’s not peddling (or meddling with) art supplies, he’s writing, reading submissions, or off exploring with his sweet, goofy pit bulls.
Dr. Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil (2016) and Corpselight (2017), as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. The third novel in the Verity Fassbinder series, Restoration, will be released in 2018 by Jo Fletcher Books (Hachette International).
She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and six Aurealis Awards.
Zeina Sleiman is a Palestinian Canadian writer and educator based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (also known as Edmonton). She is a Tin House workshop alum and former mentee in Canada’s Writers Union BIPOC Connect Program. She is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Silk Road Institute. Her debut novel Where the Jasmine Blooms will be released in the Spring of 2025.
Alan Smale has degrees in physics and astrophysics from the University of Oxford, England, works as an astrophysicist and data archive manager at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and sings with high-energy (and astronomically correct) vocal band The Chromatics. His speculative fiction stories have appeared in venues including Realms of Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future #13, Podcastle, and Pseudopod. He is a graduate of Taos Toolbox 2011, and his novella “A Clash of Eagles” in Panverse Two just won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (Short Form).
Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, Nora May French, and remembered as “The Last of the Great Romantics” and “The Bard of Auburn”.
Smith was one of “the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft”, but some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. The fantasy critic L. Sprague de Camp said of him that “nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse.” Smith was a member of the Lovecraft circle and his literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft’s death in 1937. His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.
Of his writing style, Smith stated that: “My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.”
Claudia Smith is a video game translator who reads (and narrates) for fun. She was introduced to Pseudopod by her old university friend, Helen Keeble, and highly recommends reading her two books, Fang Girl and No Angel – especially if, as well as being a fan of the horror genre, you also enjoy a bit of light-hearted teen vampire romance parody.