Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant edited the acclaimed anthology Steampunk! They also started a zine, founded an independent publishing house, own two letterpresses, and edited the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for five years. Kelly Link is the author of three acclaimed short story collections, and her award-winning stories have appeared in many anthologies. Gavin J. Grant has published numerous articles and short stories. They live in Northampton, Massachusetts, with their daughter, Ursula.
Gavin J. Grant is a firm believer in the do-it-yourself ethos that powers the steampunk movement. He started a zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, in 1996, cofounded Small Beer Press, an independent publishing house with his wife, Kelly Link, and in 2010 launched WeightlessBooks.com, an ebooksite for independent presses. He has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Bookslut, Xerography Debt, Scifiction, The Journal Of Pulse Pounding Narratives, and Strange Horizons. He co-edited The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and for five years co-edited the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy&Horror. He lives with his wife and daughter in Massachusetts.
Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebula Awards, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and play Ping-Pong. In 1996 they started the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

M. T. Anderson is an accomplished author of a wide range of titles, including works of fantasy and satire, for readers of various ages. He studied English literature at Harvard University and Cambridge University and went on to receive his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.

M. T. Anderson is known for challenging readers to look at the world in new ways. “We write because we can’t decipher things the first time around,” he says. His previous books include Thirsty, a vampire novel; Burger Wuss, a revenge story set in a fast-food emporium; and Feed, a futuristic satirical novel widely lauded as one of the most important and pioneering works of the recent dystopian craze. A finalist for the National Book Award, Feed received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize or YA fiction in 2003 and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor.

The author’s passion for history and classical music were inspirations for his sophisticated and much-lauded epic The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation,Volume I: The Pox Party, a National Book Award Winner, and Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves. The two novels, both Michael L. Printz Honor recipients, trace the story of a fictional slave in pre–Revolutionary War Boston — a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty, while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim.

M. T. Anderson’s work may be best known for its sophisticated wit and storylines, highlighting his belief that young people are more intelligent than some might think. When asked why he gives so much credit to his young audience, Anderson says that “Our survival as a nation rests upon the willingness of the young to become excited and engaged by new ideas we never considered as adults.”

M. T. Anderson was an instructor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he now serves as a board member. From 2003–2012, he also served on the board of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, a national nonprofit organization that advocates or literacy, literature, and libraries. He has published stories for adults in literary journals such as the Northwest Review, the Colorado Review, and Conjunctions. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was born on an army base called Fort Belvoir, near Alexandria, Virginia. But I only stayed there for the first four months of my life and have never even been back to the East Coast of America. Since then, I’ve lived in Hawaii, Washington, California, and England.

I’ve only ever really wanted to be a writer. I studied English Literature at the University of Southern California, and when I graduated, I got a job as a corporate writer at a cable company in Los Angeles, writing manuals and speeches and once even an advertisement for the Gilroy, California, Garlic Festival. I got my first story published in Genre magazine in 1997 and was working on my first novel when I moved to London in 1999. I’ve lived here ever since. I taught Creative Writing at Oxford University for three years, usually to students older than I was. I write for one of the U.K. national papers, and I’ve also been writer in residence for Booktrust. Anything and everything to do with writing, that’s how I want to make my life.


I made up stories all the time when I was young, though I was usually too embarrassed to show them to anybody. That’s okay if you do that; when you’re ready, you’re ready. The important thing is to keep writing.

For young adults, I’ve written A Monster Calls, More Than This, and the Chaos Walking trilogy: The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and The Answer, and Monsters of Men. I’ve also written two books for adults, a novel called The Crash of Hennington and a short story collection called Topics About Which I Know Nothing, a title that seemed funny at the time but less so 10,000 mentions later.

Here’s a helpful hint if you want to be a writer: When I’m working on a first draft, all I write is 1,000 words a day, which isn’t that much (I started out with 300, then moved up to 500, now I can do 1,000 easy). And if I write my 1,000 words, I’m done for the day, even if it only took an hour (it usually takes more, of course, but not always). Novels are anywhere from 60,000 words on up, so it’s possible that just sixty days later you might have a whole first draft. The Knife of Never Letting Go is 112,900 words and took about seven months to get a good first draft. Lots of rewrites followed. That’s the fun part, where the book really starts to come together just exactly how you see it, the part where you feel like a real writer.

Three Things You Might Not Know About Me:

1. I have a tattoo of a rhinoceros.

2. I’ve run three marathons.

3. Under no circumstances will I eat onions.