Writer and critic Elizabeth Hand is the author of seven novels, the most recent of which is Mortal Love, and two story collections, Bibliomancy: Four Novellas (winner of the 2004 World Fantasy Award) and Last Summer at Mars Hill. Her fiction has received numerous awards, including an Individual Artist's Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission/NEA. Her novella "The Least Trumps" was shortlisted in Best American Short Stories 2002. Since 1988, she has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, and her reviews and essays have appeared in a number of other publications, including Fantasy & Science Fiction (where she is a columnist) and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She has also written numerous novelizations and a popular series of Star Wars juveniles. She lives on the coast of Maine with her two children and her partner, UK critic John Clute, where she is working on her seventh novel, Generation Loss.

Allen M. Steele was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his B.A. in Communications from New England College in Henniker, NH, and his M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri. His novels and short fiction collections include Orbital Decay, Labyrinth of Night, Oceanspace, Chronospace, and the "Coyote" trilogy--Coyote, Coyote Rising, and the forthcoming Coyote Frontier

His work has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in many anthologies. He was First Runner-Up for the 1990 John W. Campbell Award, and Orbital Decay won the 1990 Locus Award for Best First Novel. He's won two Hugo Awards ('96, '97), two Locus Awards, two Asimov's Readers Awards, the Analog AnLab Award, the 1996 Science Fiction Weekly Reader Appreciation Award, and 1998 Science Fiction Chronicle Readers Award as well as the 1993 Donald A. Wollheim Award and the 2002 Phoenix Award. Steele serves on the Board of Advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and the Board of Advisors for the SFWA.

He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife Linda and their two dogs.

The winner of both a Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award for her short fiction, P. D. Cacek has, by her estimation, written well over 1,650,000 words, a good number of which have appeared in print. Cacek has published four novels, including Night Prayers and The Wind Caller, two collections, and over two hundred short stories. She has also edited the Horror Writers Association's anthology Bell, Book & Beyond.

Cacek holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing Option from California State University, Long Beach, and has been writing fiction professionally for the last fifteen years. She has taught writing and has taken it as a personal challenge to try to correct some of the time-honored "Rules."

John Clute was born in Canada in 1940 and raised there. From 1956 until 1964 he lived in the USA. Since 1968 he has lived in London, though he spends much of his time with his partner, Elizabeth Hand, in Maine.

Though his first professional publication was a long poem called "Carcajou Lament" for Triquarterly in 1959, he has written mostly non-fiction. He began professional reviewing for The Toronto Star in 1966, and has worked as a reviewer, mostly in the literatures of the fantastic, for many journals since then. American journals include Collage; The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; The Washington Post; The New York Times; The Los Angeles Times; Omni; The New York Review of Science Fiction; Science Fiction Weekly; Nova Express; Science Fiction Eye; the Boston Herald; Salonmagazine. British journals include Interzone; Times Literary Supplement; Observer; Sunday Times; Guardian; Independent; Correspondent; Mail on Sunday; New Statesman; New Scientist; Listener; Foundation. Much of this material is assembled in three collections: Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986 (1988), Look at the Evidence (1996) and Scores: Reviews 1993-2003 (2003).

Other non-fiction books include The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979; second edition 1993) with Peter Nicholls, and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) with John Grant. In both cases he and Nicholls and Grant were listed as editors, though the books were in fact mostly written by these three. He wrote Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995) solo, and The Book of End Times (1999). He has co-edited several anthologies.

He publishes fiction infrequently. His two novels are The Disinheriting Party (1977) and Appleseed (2001). The latter is SF. A Third Edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is in the works, as well as an Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature.

He is also a book collector.

James Morrow is best known for his magnum opus, the Godhead Trilogy. The first installment, Towing Jehovah, winner of the World Fantasy Award, recounts the efforts of a supertanker captain to entomb the corpse of God in an Arctic glacier. The sequel, Blameless in Abaddon, tells of a small-town judge who prosecutes the Corpus Dei before the World Court. In The Eternal Footman, God's skull goes into geosynchronous orbit above Times Square, causing a plague of despair.

Morrow's long-awaited postmodern historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, will appear from William Morrow early in 2006. His newest collection is The Cat's Pajamas and Other Stories, published last summer by Tachyon Books. Delirium Books has recently issued the Godhead Trilogy in a deluxe slipcased edition, including a chapbook of one-act plays on the theme of the Deus Absconditus (www.deliriumbooks.com).

The author's other novels include This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), a Nebula finalist, and Only Begotten Daughter (1990), winner of the World Fantasy Award. His early short fiction is collected in Bible Stories for Adults, including the Nebula Award-winning fable, "The Deluge." His 1991 novella City of Truth also received a Nebula Award.

Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Jim spent his adolescent years making short 8mm fantasy films with his friends, including adaptations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." His affection for satiric and philosophical fiction comes largely from the novels he studied in his high school World Literature course. He currently lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Kathryn, his seventeen-year-old son, Christopher, and two dogs: Pooka, an ASPCA Border collie, and Amtrak, a Doberman that Jim and Kathy found in an Orlando train station.

He devotes his time to his family, his Lionel electric trains, his DVD collection of guilty-pleasure Hollywood epics, and his novel-in-progress, Prometheus Wept, which he describes as "a combination of Frankenstein and Lolita."

Sheila Williams is the executive editor of Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. She started working at Asimov's in June 1982 and began working on Analog in 1998. She is also the co-founder of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing (formerly the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing). In addition, she coordinates the websites for Asimov's.

Her latest anthology, co-edited with Connie Willis, is A Women's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and about Women (Warner Aspect, 2001). She has edited or co-edited over twenty other anthologies.

Williams received her bachelor's degree from Elmira College in Elmira, New York, and her master's from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. During her junior year she studied at the London School of Economics. She lives in New York City with her husband, David Bruce, and her two beautiful daughtersÑIrene and Juliet.