Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and an apprentice city planner.

Under both names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada and Sweden, lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw.

Meg Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, winner of the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award, and The Book of Etta.

The Book of Flora is the third novel in the Road to Nowhere trilogy. The author lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes like she's running out of time.

Fran Wilde is an author and technology consultant. In 2015, her debut novel, Updraft, won the Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and was nominated for the Best Novel Nebula Award.

While not working on her Bone Universe books, Wilde writes short stories for various popular SFF publications and blogs about food and genre for Cooking the Books, the popular social-parenting website GeekMom, and at The Washington Post.

Ada Palmer is an author, historian and composer. She did her PhD at Harvard, teaches History at the University of Chicago, blogs at ExUrbe.com, composes close harmony folk music and performs with the a capella group Sassafrass.