Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a multiple Hugo winner, and a frequent finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards.

A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she spent five years touring nationally with puppet theatres. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters.

Max Gladstone is a fencer, a fiddler, and a two-time finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. He is fluent in Mandarin and has taught English in China. He is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated Craft Sequence of novels, a game developer, and the showrunner for the fiction serial, Bookburners. A graduate of Yale, Max lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Naomi Kritzer is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and several novels for adults, including two trilogies for Bantam.

Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and a finalist for the Nebula Award. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Charlie Jane Anders' latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She's also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award, and her story "Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue" won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz.

Hugo Award-winning and bestselling author Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and The Boston Globe, and they won a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Their most recent fiction credits include Vice and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was a 2018 finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published in 2019.

Kelly Robson's Tor.com novella Waters of Versailles won the Aurora Award, and was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award.

She has also been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Sunburst Award. Her work has been selected for numerous Year's Best anthologies.

Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.