by Guran, Paula
Paul Finch is a former cop and journalist turned full-time writer. He cut his literary teeth penning episodes of the British TV crime drama, The Bill, and has written extensively in the field of children’s animation. To date, he’s had twelve books and nearly three hundred stories and novellas published. His first collection, Aftershocks, won the British Fantasy Award and he later won the award for his novella, Kid. He is also an International Horror Guild Award-winner for his story, The Old North Road. Most recently, he has written four Doctor Who audio dramas. His horror novel, Stronghold, was published in 2010, Doctor Who novel, Hunter’s Moon, in 2011, and 2012 will see the publication of his novel, Dark North. Finch has also written scripts for several movies. The most recent of these, The Devil’s Rock, was released in 2011. He lives in Lancashire, UK, with his wife and two children. His website is paulfinch-writer.blogspot.com.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, The 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 story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His new collection, Crackpot Palace, will be out in August 2012. Ford is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire.
Laura Anne Gilman is the author of the Cosa Nostradamus books for Luna (the Retrievers and Paranormal Scene Investigations series), a YA trilogy for HarperCollins, and the award-nominated The Vineart War trilogy from Pocket. She also writes paranormal romances for Nocturne as Anna Leonard. Some of her short fiction was collected in Dragon Virus. In 2012, she will be dipping her pen into the mystery field, as well. A former executive editor at NAL, Laura Anne is an amateur chef, oenophile, and cat-servant. She lives in New York City, where she also runs d.y.m.k. productions.
Elizabeth Hand (www.elizabethhand.com) is the multiple-award-winning author of twelve novels and three collections of short fiction. Her most recent novel, Available Dark, was named as one of the Top Ten Best Mystery/Thrillers of the year by Publishers Weekly. A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Author, Hand is also a longtime book critic and essayist who frequently contributes to the Washington Post, Salon, Village Voice, and DownEast Magazine, among many others. She has two children and divides her time between Maine and North London.
Glen Hirshberg’s awards include the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award (for his novelette, “The Janus Tree”) and three International Horror Guild Awards, including two for Best Collection (for American Morons in 2006 and The Two Sams in 2003). He is also the author of two novels, The Snowman’s Children and The Book of Bunk. “After-Words” appears in his new collection, The Janus Tree and Other Stories, just out from Subterranean. With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a traveling ghost story performance troupe that tours the west coast of the United States and elsewhere each October. His fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of ten novels and two collections. Most recent are Zombie Bake-Off and Growing Up Dead in Texas. Next are Flushboy and Not for Nothing. Stephen’s been a Stoker finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist three times, a Black Quill finalist, and has been an NEA fellow and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction. He teaches in the MFA program at UC Boulder.
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including the award-winning Threshold, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and, most recently, The Drowning Girl. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. Subterranean Press published a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) last year. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn.
Stephen King has since published over fifty books, many short stories, and has become one of the world’s most successful writers. King has won numerous award and the National Book Foundation has honored him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. They are regular contributors to a number of charities including many libraries and have been honored for their philanthropic activities.
Margo Lanagan is an internationally acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Her fiction has garnered many awards, nominations, and shortlistings. Her Black Juice was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, won two World Fantasy Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Red Spikes won the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Her latest novel is Sea Hearts (Allen & Unwin, Australia), known as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the UK, it will come out under that title the US in September. She lives in Sydney.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His novella, Bubba Ho-tep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. Both were directed by Don Coscarelli. His works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, eight Bram Stoker awards, the Grinzani Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others. All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, his first novel for young adults, was published last year. His most recent novel for adults is Edge of Dark Water.
Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in London, England. She worked at various jobs until in 1974-75 DAW Books began to publish her science fiction and fantasy, beginning with The Birthgrave. Since then she has published over ninety books and over three hundred short stories, written for TV and BBC Radio. Her latest novels are available from the Immanion Press and reprints—such as Flat Earth sequence and The Birthgrave Trilogy—via Norilana Books. Much of her work will soon be available in ebook form via Orion, and other houses. She lives on the Sussex Weald with her husband writer/artist/photographer/model maker John Kaiine.
Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American writer of science fiction and fantasy. She majored in math, and it is a source of continual delight to her that mathematics can be mined for story ideas. Her first collection of short fiction, Conservation of Shadows, will be published in 2013.
Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who presently makes his home in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife MaryAnn Harris. His most recent books are Under My Skin and Eyes Like Leaves. His first album, Old Blue Truck, came out in early 2011. For more information about his work, visit his website at www.charlesdelint.com. He’s also on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
Maureen McHugh has published four novels and two collections of short stories. She’s won a Hugo and a Tiptree award. Her most recent collection, After the Apocalypse, was named a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Best Book of 2011, was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist, a Story Prize Notable Book, and named to the io9 Best SF&F Books of 2011 List as well as the Tiptree Award Honor List. McHugh lives in Los Angeles, where she is attempting to sell her soul to the entertainment industry.
Sarah Monette lives in a 106-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. The Bone Key, a 2007 collection of interrelated short stories, was re-issued last year in a new edition. Her non-themed collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves was published in 2011. Sarah has written two novels (A Com
panion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.
Naomi Novik’s first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, the opening volume of the Temeraire series, was published in 2006 and has been translated into twenty-seven languages and optioned by Peter Jackson. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, as well as one of the architects of the open-source Archive Of Our Own. Naomi lives in New York City with her husband, Edgar-winning mystery novelist Charles Ardai, and their shiny new daughter Evidence. Her website is naominovik.com and she can be followed as naominovik on Livejournal, Twitter, and Facebook.
Paul Park lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and teaches at Williams College. He has written eleven novels in a variety of genres, and numerous short stories. His most recent work includes Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award) and Ragnarok, a post-apocalyptic pseudo-Norse edda (nominated for the 2011 Rhysling Award). Under the name Paulina Claiborne, he has also written a recently published Forgotten Realms novel called The Rose of Sarifal.
Norman Partridge’s fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” according to Joe Lansdale. Partridge’s novel Dark Harvest was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006, and two short-story collections were published in 2010—Lesser Demons from Subterranean Press and Johnny Halloween from Cemetery Dance. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. His work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards. He can be found on the web at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.
Tim Powers is the author of twelve novels, including The Anubis Gates, Declare, Hide Me AMong the Graves, and On Stranger Tides, which was adapted for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same title. His novels have twice won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, twice won the World Fantasy Award, and three times won the Locus Poll Award. Powers has taught fiction writing classes at the University of Redlands, Chapman University, and the Orange County High School of the Arts. He has been an instructor at the Writers of the Future program and the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop at Michigan State University. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California.
Norman Prentiss recently won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for his first book, Invisible Fences. Previously he won a Stoker in the short fiction category for “In the Porches of My Ears,” which originally appeared in Postscripts 18. His fiction has also appeared in Black Static, Commutability, Tales from the Gorezone, Damned Nation, Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and in three editions of the Shivers anthology series. His poetry has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, Baltimore’s City Paper, and A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock. His essays on gothic and sensation literature have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Colby Quarterly, and The Thomas Hardy Review. Visit him online at www.normanprentiss.com.
Alan Peter Ryan (1943-2011) was the author of four novels and two collections of short fiction and the editor of five anthologies. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award and three times for the World Fantasy Award, and won a World Fantasy Award for The Bones Wizard. He also edited five anthologies of travel writing for which he won a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award. As a journalist, he wrote for all the major newspapers of the United States and for many magazines, including Smithsonian, The American Scholar, Islands, Travel & Leisure, and Playgirl.
Priya Sharma is a general practitioner in the UK, where she spends as much free time as she can devouring books and writing speculative fiction. She has a computer but prefers a fountain pen and a notebook. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Albedo One, On Spec, Alt Hist, Bourbon Penn, Fantasy, and Black Static. She is currently working on a historical fantasy novel set in North Wales, not far from where she lives. More information can be found at www.priyasharmafiction.co.uk.
Angela Slatter is a Brisbane-based writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of WFA-shortlisted Sourdough and Other Stories (Tartarus Press) and the Aurealius Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Stories (Ticonderoga Publications). Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Dreaming Again, Strange Tales II and III, 2012, and A Book of Horrors as well as journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, and On Spec. Her work has had several Honorable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, and Grant-edited Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series; and six of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Fantasy Short Story category, winning in 2011 with Lisa L Hannett for “The Febraury Dragon.” She blogs at www.angelaslatter.com.
Tia V. Travis was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award. Her fiction has been reprinted in two volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Poe’s Children: The New Horror. A native Canadian, she now lives in Northern California with her husband, author Norman Partridge, and two-year-old daughter, Neve Rose.
Lisa Tuttle was born in the United States, but has lived in Britain for the past thirty years. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the Year in 1974. Her first novel, Windhaven, was a collaboration with George R. R. Martin published in 1981; her most recent is the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough, and she has published around a hundred short stories, as well as books for children and non-fiction works.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.
Kaaron Warren’s short story collection The Grinding House (CSFG Publishing) won the ACT Writers’ and Publishers’ Fiction Award and two Ditmar Awards. Her second collection, Dead Sea Fruit, published by Ticonderoga Books, won the ACT Writers’ and Publishers’ Fiction Award. Her critically acclaimed novel Slights (Angry Robot Books) won the Australian Shadows Award, the Ditmar Award, and the Canberra Critics’ Award for Fiction. Angry Robot Books also published her novels Walking the Tree (shortlisted for a Ditmar Award) and Mistification, which was released in 2011. Her stories have appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy as well as the Australian Years Best Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies. She has recently been named Special Guest for the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in 2013, and has appeared at Readercon in the USA as an invited guest. Kaaron lives in Canberra, Australia, with her husband and children. Her website is kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she tweets @KaaronWarren.
Gene Wolfe worked as an engineer before becoming editor of trade journal Plant Engineering. He retired to write full-time in 1984. Long considered to be a premier fantasy author, he is the recipient of the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as Nebula, World Fantasy, Campbell, Locus, British Fantasy, and British SF Awards. Wolfe has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His short fiction has been collected over a dozen times, most recently in The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009). The most recent of Wolfe’s numerous novels is Home Fires (2011). His novel Peace will be p
ublished in December 2012.
Acknowledgments
“Hair” by Joan Aiken © 2011 by Joan Aiken Estate (John Sebastian Brown and Elizabeth Delano Charlaff). Used by permission. All rights reserved. First publication: The Monkey’s Wedding & Other Stories (Small Beer Press) / The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August, 2011.
“Rakshasi” by Kelley Armstrong © 2011 by KLA Fricke Inc. First publication: The Monster’s Corner: Through Inhuman Eyes, edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Griffin).
“Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” by Adam Callaway © 2011 by Adam Callaway. First publication: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #73, July 14, 2011.
“The Lake” by Tananarive Due © 2011 by Tananarive Due. First publication: The Monster’s Corner: Through Inhuman Eyes, edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011).
“Tell Me I’ll See You Again” by Dennis Etchison © 2011 by Dennis Etchison. First publication: A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones (Quercus).
“King Death” by Paul Finch © 2011 by Paul Finch. First publication: King Death (Spectral Press,).
“The Last Triangle” by Jeffrey Ford © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford. First publication: Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse).
“Crossroads” by Laura Anne Gilman © 2011 by Laura Anne Gilman. First publication: Fantasy, August 2011.
“Near Zennor” by Elizabeth Hand © 2011 by Elizabeth Hand. First publication: A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones (Quercus).
“After-Words” by Glen Hirshberg © 2011 by Glen Hirshberg. First publication: The Janus Tree and Other Stories (Subterranean Press).