Nathan Ballingrud is the award-winning author of the short story collection North American Lake Monsters, from Small Beer Press. He lives with his daughter in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is at work on his first novel.
Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and his Bram Stoker Award — winning collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lovecraft Unbound, Haunted Legends, and Fearful Symmetries. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.
Dennis Danvers has published seven novels, including New York Times notables Circuit of Heaven and The Watch, Locus and Bram Stoker nominee Wilderness, and The Bright Spot (under pseudonym Robert Sydney). His short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines, webzines, and anthologies.
He teaches fiction writing and science fiction and fantasy literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and blogs at DennisDanvers.com, where a free novel, Bad Angels, has recently been posted.
Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror, and author of the multi-award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, its “premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows, and its “most acclaimed writer of the dark fantastic” by Cemetery Dance magazine. His collection Basic Black won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection.
London’s Guardian called his debut novel Clowns at Midnight “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s The Magus.”
Terry’s homepage can be found at TerryDowling.com.
Katherine Dunn’s third novel, Geek Love, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and for the National Book Award. Dunn is a prize-winning boxing journalist and teaches fiction in the Pacific University MFA Writing program.
Jeffrey Ford is the multi-award winning author of the novels Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year.
His short fiction has been published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies and has been collected in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace.
Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, and Motherless Child, the latter recently reissued in a new, revised edition by Tor, with two sequels to follow. His short fiction has been collected in The Two Sams, American Morons, and The Janus Tree. He has won the Shirley Jackson Award and three International Horror Guild Awards.
With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he cofounded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a reading/live music/performance event that tours the West Coast every fall and has also made international appearances.
He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, son, daughter, and cats.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and five collections. Most recent are Not for Nothing, The Least of My Scars, and The Gospel of Z. Up soon are After the People Lights Have Gone Off, Once Upon a Time in Texas, and, with Paul Tremblay, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly.
Jones has had some two hundred stories published, many reprinted in best-of-the-year annuals. He’s won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction, the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, and an NEA fellowship in fiction. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU — Boulder and UCR — Palm Desert.
He lives in Colorado, and really likes werewolves and slashers and hair metal.
For more information, see DemonTheory.net or @SGJ72 on Twitter.
Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and anthology editor. Although most of his short fiction was dark fantasy or horror, his two novels From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask were more mainstream.
He won the World Fantasy Award in 2013 for his most recent collection, Where Furnaces Burn, and he won the British Fantasy Award twice. His short stories have been collected in five volumes. He died in 2013.
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica. A 2006 graduate of Clarion, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, Pseudopod, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011. Engines received a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection, and “Omphalos” received a Best Novelette nomination. You can find her online at LiviaLlewellyn.com.
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including most recently Love Is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared in Supernatural Noir, West Coast Crime Wave, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2013. He has written about martial arts and professional wrestling for The Smart Set, The Village Voice, and Clarkesworld Magazine. With Masumi Washington, Nick coedited the essay collection The Battle Royale Slam Book—featuring work by Sam Hamm, John Skipp, Brian Keene, and others — about the novel by Koushun Takami and the related film and manga projects.
Priya Sharma is a doctor in the UK. Her fiction has appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Albedo One, and Alt Hist, as well as on Tor.com. She has been reprinted in previous editions of The Best Horror of the Year, edited by Ellen Datlow, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, edited by Paula Guran, and will be in more reprint anthologies in 2014. This year she hopes to cure her morbid fear of novel writing.
More information can be found at PriyaSharmaFiction.WordPress.com.
Robert Shearman has written four short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. The most recent, Remember Why You Fear Me, was published in 2012.
He writes regularly in the UK for theater and BBC Radio, winning the Sunday Times Playwriting Award and the Guinness Award in association with the Royal National Theatre. He’s probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks to the twenty-first- century revival of Doctor Who, in an episode that was a finalist for the Hugo Award.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford award. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, has recently been published. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, After, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, The A.V. Club, Strange Horizons, and io9. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks at GenevieveValentine.com.
A. C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories, which have appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Shimmer, and The Best Horror of the Year, among others. In addition to her writing, she coedits Unlikely Story. For more information, visit the author’s website at ACWise.net.
N. Lee Wood was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but currently lives in New Zealand with her partner and their fat, bolshie cat.
Wood is the author of Looking for the Mahdi, which was selected as a New York Times notable book. Her other science fiction titles include Faraday’s Orphans, Bloodrights, and Master of None. Her short stories have been published in Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Writing as “Lee Jackson,” she is the author of a mainstream novel, Redemption, and has also published two novels in a mystery/crime series, Kingdom of Lies and Kingdom of Silence. She is currently working on completing her eighth novel, Glass Hearts.
She holds a master’s degree in English literature and has taught creative writing to undergraduate and private students.