Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for four decades. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com and Nightfire. She has edited numerous anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year annual series, When Things Get Dark:Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, Body Shocks, and Screams from the Dark: 19 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous. She’s won multiple Locus, Hugo, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards. Datlow was recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for outstanding contribution to the genre, and was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career. She was honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in the East Village, New York City, with Matthew Kressel.
 
 
Ellen Datlow, an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy editor, was born and raised in New York City. She has been a short story and book editor for more than thirty years and has edited or coedited several critically acclaimed anthologies of speculative fiction, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series and Black Thorn, White Rose (1994) with Terri Windling. Datlow has received numerous honors, including multiple Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards, and Life Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Association, to name just a few. She resides in New York.  
J. Calvin Pierce was the author of the Ambermere fantasy series. “Sahib” was one of two short stories he wrote. He died in 2021.
 
Kathe Koja is a writer and producer based in Detroit. Her work includes The Cipher, Skin, Under the Poppy, and Dark Factory.
 
Barry N. Malzberg is the author of more than thirty science fiction novels and hundreds of short stories, as well as several thrillers and erotic novels under his own name and various pseudonyms. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his 1972 novel, Beyond Apollo. His 1982 collection of critical essays, The Engines of the Night, was a major contribution to the field of science fiction.
 
Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and anthology editor. In addition to his dark fantasy and horror short fiction, Lane published two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask.

He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 for his collection, Where Furnaces Burn, and won the British Fantasy Award twice. His short stories have been collected in seven volumes. He died in 2013.
 
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of over seventy books encompassing novels, poetry, criticism, story collections, plays, and essays. Her novel Them won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1970. Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for more than three decades and currently holds the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professorship at Princeton University. 
 
Melanie Tem, British Fantasy and World Fantasy Award–winning author, passed away in 2015. The most important of her short stories are collected in Singularity and Other Stories. Tem’s other works include her last novel, The Yellow Wood, and a recent collection of her plays and poetry, Fry Day Plays & Poems.
 
Kelley Eskridge is an author and screenwriter. Her novel Solitaire is a New York Times Notable Book, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, Tiptree (now Otherwise), Gaylactic Spectrum, and Endeavour Awards. Her film OtherLife was a selection at multiple film festivals. She lives in Seattle with her wife, Nicola Griffith. She loves food, wine, and good conversations.
 
Sarah Clemens is an artist who also writes. She has authored short stories for Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, as well as Asimov’s Science Fiction. Much of her art is also related to the fantastic. She and her husband live in Arizona with their cats, carnivorous plants, and terrariums.
 
Nicola Griffith is a dual UK-US citizen living in Seattle. She is the author of nine novels including Hild, Spear, and the forthcoming Menewood. She has written for the New York Times, The Guardian, Nature, and New Scientist, and her awards include four Lambda Literary Awards, the Ray Bradbury Prize, and the Italia, and Nebula, World Fantasy, and Otherwise/Tiptree Awards. She holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University and is married to novelist and screenwriter Kelley Eskridge.
 
M. John Harrison, is a multi-award winning English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space. His most recent book, Wish I Was Here, has been referred to as an anti-memoir.
 
Douglas Clegg is a screenwriter, poet, and the author of dozens of novels, novellas, and short story collections. His fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He is married to Raul Silva and lives near the New England coast, where he is currently writing his next work of fiction.
K. W. Jeter was born in Los Angeles in 1950. His novels include Dr. Adder, The Glass Hammer, and Infernal Devices. His most recent publication is Real Dangerous Place, the latest in his Kim Oh thriller series.
 
Richard C. Matheson is a #1 bestselling author and screenwriter/producer. He has created, written, and produced acclaimed TV series, mini-series, and films, including cult favorite Three O’Clock High and Stephen King’s Battleground, which won two Emmys. Matheson’s short stories appear in his collections, Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, Zoopraxis, Dystopia, and over one hundred anthologies, including Best of the Year volumes. His novels include Created By and The Ritual of Illusion.
 
Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona, Florida, and lived the last years of his life in Portland, Oregon. His short fiction won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He died in 2014.
Stephen Dedman grew up (though many would dispute this) on the outer limits of Perth’s metropolitan area, far enough from a good library that he had to make up his own science fiction and horror stories. He continued to do this when he should have been studying, and after false starts at two other universities, received a bachelor’s in creative writing and film in 1984. Since then, he’s held too many boring jobs and a few interesting ones, including actor, tutor, experimental subject, editorial assistant for Australian Physicist magazine, education officer and used dinosaur salesman for the WA Museum, and the manager of a science fiction bookshop. He has been writing for fun for more than thirty years, and for money for twenty; he sold his first short story in 1977, and his first novel in 1995. He quit yet another boring job in 1996 to write full time, and is currently working on two novels and writing one new story a month. Dedman is the author of the novels The Art of Arrow Cutting (Tor, 1997) and Foreign Bodies (Tor, 1999), and the nonfiction book Bone Hunters: On the Trail of the Dinosaurs (Omnibus, 1998). His short stories have appeared in an eclectic range of magazines and anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Little Deaths, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Interzone, Weird Tales, and Realms of Fantasy. His work has won the Aurealis Award and Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award, and been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.


Dedman lives in western Australia, and enjoys reading, travel, movies, complicated relationships, talking to cats, and startling people.
Lucy Taylor is an award-winning author who has published seven novels and over a hundred short stories in anthologies and magazines. Her most recent work can be found in the anthologies The Big Book of Blasphemy, Cutting Edge, A Fistful of Dinosaurs, and Vagabond 001, 002, and 003. Her Bram Stoker Award–winning novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities, was recently reprinted in German by Festa Verlag Publications and is currently being translated into Russian by Poltergeist Press. Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
 
Harry Crews wrote novels, nonfiction books, and a memoir. His best known works are The Gospel Singer, The Gypsy’s Curse, A Feast of Snakes, The Knockout Artist, and Scar Lover. His work was gritty, and he often wrote about outsiders and grotesques living in the Deep South. Crews lived in Florida and died in 2012.
 
Wayne Allen Sallee primarily writes short fiction, and several of his stories were reprinted in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories anthologies. All of his short fiction is being reprinted by Crossroad Press in Rapid Transit: Volumes 1–3. Sallee’s novel, The Holy Terror, has been published in five languages. He wrote Proactive Contrition, a memoir, and is currently updating Pain Grin, a chapbook that will include ruminations about the COVID pandemic and how it affected Chicago.
 
Nicholas Royle is the author of several short story collections, including, most recently, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny, and seven novels. He has edited over twenty-five anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories. He runs Nightjar Press, which publishes original short stories as signed, numbered chapbooks. His English translation of Vincent de Swarte’s 1998 novel Pharricide was published by Confingo Publishing in 2019. In 2021, his memoir, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector, was published by Salt.
 

Pat Cadigan is the author of more than a dozen books, including two nonfiction titles, a young adult novel, and two Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novels, Synners and Fools. She has won two Scribe Awards for a novelization of Alita: Battle Angel and an adaptation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for Alien 3, along with three Locus Awards and a Hugo Award for her novelette “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi.” Pat lives in North London with her husband, Chris Fowler.