George R. R. Martin began writing very young, selling monster stories to other neighborhood children for pennies, dramatic readings included. He became a comic book fan and collector in high school, and began to write fiction for comic fanzines. Martin's first professional sale was made in 1970 at age 21: "The Hero," to Galaxy magazine. Other sales followed.

In 1970 Martin received a B. S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, graduating summa cum laude. As a conscientious objector, Martin did alternative service from 1972-1974 with VISTA, attached to Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. He also directed chess tournaments for the Continental Chess Association from 1973-1976, and was a Journalism instructor at Clarke College, Dubuque, Iowa, from 1976-1978. He served as writer-in-residence at Clarke College from 1978-1979. He wrote part-time throughout the 1970s and became a full-time writer in 1979.

Moving on to Hollywood, Martin signed on as a story editor for Twilight Zone at CBS Television in 1986. In addition to his duties as story editor, he wrote five episodes for the series. In 1987 Martin became an Executive Story Consultant for Beauty and the Beast on CBS. In 1988 he became a Producer for Beauty and the Beast, then in 1989 moved up to Co-Supervising Producer. He also wrote thirteen episodes for the series. He was Executive Producer for Doorways, a pilot he wrote for Columbia Pictures television, which was filmed during 1992-1993.

Martin's present home is Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (he was South-Central regional Director from 1977-1979, and Vice President from 1996-1998), and of Writers' Guild of America, West. He is the author of numerous novels, including Dying of the Light, Fevre Dream, and the New York Times-bestselling series, A Song of Ice and Fire. His short story collections include A Song for Lya and Other Stories; Sandkings; and GRRM: a rretrospective, forthcoming from Subterranean Press. Two of his short stories, "Remembering Melody" and "Sandkings," were adapted for television, while his story "Nightflyers" was made into a feature film. He has also edited the acclaimed anthology series New Voices in Science Fiction and Wild Cards.

Martin has won a Bram Stoker Award, a World Fantasy Award, two Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and six Locus Awards.

The author of fourteen novels as well as short fiction (published and upcoming), Catherine Asaro is acclaimed for her multiple-award winning Skolian Empire series, which combines adventure, hard science, romance, themes that challenge the status quo, and fast paced action. Her stand-alone novel, The Quantum Rose, won the 2001 Nebula Award. Her October 2003 novel, Skyfall, was cited by SF Site as "...the perfect hook to get readers caught up in the Skolian Empire saga. Enjoy the non-stop action, adventure, and danger in Skyfall and then see if you can say no to the rest of the series." Asaro's novella "Moonglow," in Charmed Destinies (November, 2003) will be followed by her fantasy novel, The Charmed Sphere (February, 2004). Also on the horizon in February, 2004, is Irresistible Forces, a six-author anthology for ROC, edited by Asaro, which includes stories by Lois McMaster Bujold and Catherine. Praised for her ability to mix hard science fiction with character-driven stories, physicist Asaro has a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard.

Ellen Kushner is a novelist, performer and public radio personality. Her newest novel, written with Delia Sherman, is The Fall of the Kings (Bantam/Spectra), which takes place 60 years after her first novel, the "mannerpunk" cult-classic, Swordspoint (winner of the 2000 Gaylactic Network Spectrum Hall of Fame Award for Best Fiction pre-1998). Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won the Mythopoeic and the World Fantasy Awards. In 1997 she co-edited The Horns of Elfland, Original Short Stories of Music and Magic. Her short fiction often appears in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. The poetry she's written that she's not too embarrassed to show anyone can be found online in Terri Windling's Endicott Studio Coffeehouse. In 1987 she left a publishing career in NYC to become a host at WGBH Radio in Boston, where she has been a public radio host ever since. Since 1996 public radio audiences have known her as the writer and host of PRI's award-winning national weekly program "Sound & Spirit with Ellen Kushner," an exploration of myth and music that Bill Moyers has called "The best program on public radio!" Kushner's performance piece The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer "Nutcracker" (2001 Gracie Allen award) is now available on CD from Rykodisc, and performed live with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra. Her newest performance piece, Esther: the Feast of Masks, is available online.

Delia Sherman has spent much of her life at one end of a classroom or another. At Brown University she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and at Boston University and Northeastern she taught Expository Writing and Fantasy as Literature. In 1995, she exchanged academia for publishing, becoming a contributing editor for Tor Books and co-editing the fantasy anthologies The Horns of Elfland and The Essential Bordertown. But she still loves to teach, and has been on the faculty of the Clarion East and Odyssey writing workshops, as well as participating in the Writers' Respite at Wiscon.

Her first novel, the Chaucerian fantasy Through a Brazen Mirror (1988) was recently reprinted by Circlet Press. Her second novel, The Porcelain Dove, is an Interstitial work best described as a romantical-fantastical-historical comedy, set just before the French Revolution. It was awarded the Mythopoeic Award in 1993. The Fall of the Kings, an Interstitial historical-academic-mythic tragedy set in an invented city, was written in collaboration with partner Ellen Kushner and published in 2002. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and has been translated into French and Japanese. She has also contributed stories to the young people's anthologies A Wolf at the Door, The Green Man, and Firebirds. She is currently working on a historical novel set against the background of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and a children's book about a human changeling who lives among the fairies in New York City.

Sherman shares a 1910 urban farmhouse in Boston with Ellen Kushner and many pieces of paper. She loves traveling, gardening, and researching in bricks-and-mortar libraries (by preference, in Paris). Given a choice, she likes to write in a cafe, where they bring you things to eat and the phone's never for you.

Bob Mayer grew up in New York City, graduated from West Point and spent twenty years on active and reserve duty in the Infantry and Green Berets. He has been an Infantry Recon platoon leader, a Special Forces A-Team Leader, and a writer/instructor at the JFK Special Warfare Center & School at Fort Bragg. He is also a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Bob has twenty-six books published under his own name and four pen names. He teaches at numerous conferences as well as via correspondence/Internet and organizational speaking. There are over two million copies of his books in print and he is published in a dozen foreign countries. His Area 51 books have been consistent USA Today Bestsellers. A screenplay based on Area 51 has been written by the same writer who wrote the screenplay for the hit science-fiction movie Alien.

His latest non-fiction book, The Special Operations Way: Secrets of the Elite, is currently at several publishers under consideration.

Bob began writing when living in Asia in the late '80s while studying martial arts. It took hundreds of rejections and several manuscripts before he got his first book deal. Bob has incorporated all he has learned in The Novel Writer's Toolkit, which he started writing over ten years ago.

He is often asked why he writes under a variety of pen names. Bob does this for business reasons when dealing with different publishers. Each publisher owns the option on the next book under that name, so in order to do some different things, he uses pen names. Bob lives on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Barry B. Longyear is the first writer to win the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in the same year. In addition to his acclaimed Enemy Mine series, from which the motion picture of the same name was derived, his works include numerous short stories, two Alien Nation tie-ins, the "Circus World" series, a mainstream recovery novel Saint Mary Blue, and science fiction and fantasy novels ranging from Sea Of Glass to The God Box. His recent works include The Enemy Papers (all three novels of the Enemy Mine series, including the never-before published The Last Enemy and the Drac bible, The Talman), Infinity Hold\3 (all three novels of the Infinity Hold series: Infinity Hold, Kill All The Lawyers, and Keep The Law) and Yesterday's Tomorrow: Recovery Meditations for Hard Cases. He has completed training in becoming a private investigator, and in his as yet unpublished efforts at breaking into the mystery genre, he is now working on his third mystery novel in his Joe Torio series, Rope Tricks. The prequels are The Hangman's Son and Just Enough Rope. He resides with his wife, Jean, in New Sharon, Maine.

Gardner Dozois is the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (which, under his editorship, has won the Locus Award as Best Magazine an unprecedented fourteen years in a row), and also edits the annual anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, now up to its Twentieth Annual Collection (and which has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology thirteen times, more than any other anthology series). He's won the Hugo Award fourteen times as the year's Best Editor, won the Locus Award as Best Editor fifteen times in a row, and has won the Nebula Award twice for his own short fiction. He is the author or editor of over ninety books, the most recent of which are The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twentieth Annual Collection, a reissue of his novel Strangers, a collection of his short fiction, Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois, and a book-length interview with him, conducted by Michael Swanwick, Being Gardner Dozois. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he has lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the last thirty years.