Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. Environmental nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire, among others. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023. Forthcoming work includes Absolution, a fourth Southern Reach novel.

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Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, the final installment of which is Kitty Saves the World. Her most recent novel is the YA-flavored space adventure Martians Abroad. She has also written several other fantasy and young adult novels. Her short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She’s a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog.

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P.C. Verrone is a writer of page and stage. His work has appeared in FIYAH Magazine, ‘Elemental Forces’ (Flame Tree Press), ‘Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive’ (Nightboat Books), and elsewhere. His unpublished vampire novel ‘The Nightlife’ won the inaugural Black Creatives Workshop (We Need Diverse Books/Penguin Random House). He has been a resident at Tin House and the Playwrights’ Center. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. He lives with his husband and their many books.

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Rick Vicens is an artist and game developer at Bethesda Game Studios in Maryland.  He has worked on video games for over 13 years on titles such as Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield. In addition to games, he previously worked on films such as Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs as well commercials, and music videos.  A highlight of his career has been bringing characters to life.  He has a love for storytelling in any medium and plans to keep creating moving entertainment.

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As a fine art professional, Mar has wielded katanas and handled Lady Gaga’s shoes. As a veterinary assistant, she has cared for hairless cats, hedgehogs, and, one time, a coyote. As a writer, her short fiction can be found in Analog, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and many other publications. She is a reader for Interstellar Flight Press and Diabolical Plots and a graduate of the Wayward Wormhole. She resides in the Pacific Northwest or can be found on various social media @‌MaroftheBooks.

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Nghi Vo lives on the shores of Lake Michigan, and her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Expanded Horizons, Crossed Genres and Icarus Magazine. She likes stories about things that fall through the cracks and live on the edges, and she has a deep love for tales of revolution (personal and political), transfiguration and transmutation. She’s a writer by trade, a storyteller by nature, a volunteer by inclination, and a dreamer by design.

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Sabrina Vourvoulias is the author of Ink (Crossed Genres, 2012), a novel that draws on her memories of Guatemala’s armed internal conflict, and of the Latinx experience in the United States. It was named to Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012.

Her short stories have appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, and in a number of anthologies, including Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, The Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2015, and Latin@ Rising.

She is also freelance op-ed columnist whose commentaries have appeared at Philly.com, Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia Magazine, City and State Pennsylvania, and The Guardian US, among others. Follow her on Twitter @followthelede.

She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, daughter and a dog who rules the household.

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M.C. Wagner is not an aromatic grape variety displaying flowery, almost perfumed, aromas, nor a high acidity.

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Wendy N. Wagner is the author of Skinwalkers, a Pathfinder Tales novel inspired by Viking lore, and she’s also published more than thirty short stories in anthologies like Cthulhu Fhtagn! and The Way of the Wizard, and in magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Farrago’s Wainscot. She is the managing/associate editor of Nightmare and Lightspeed magazine, and served as guest editor for Nightmare’s Queers Destroy Horror! special issue.

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Leigh Wallace is an Ottawa writer, artist and narrator who works for the Canadian federal government. Her fiction is available in Tesseracts 19, PodCastle and Urban Fantasist. Her art can be found at Tea Princess Chronicles and in the Sunvault anthology, and she’s narrated previously for Glittership. She is a graduate of the 2013 Viable Paradise workshop.

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