Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her Ph.D. in the comparative history program with a dissertation titled "The Victory of the Ancients: Tactics, Technology, and the Use of Classical Precedent." In 1986, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and won Lambda Literary Awards in 2001, 1996 and 1995 for Point of Dreams (sharing the award with long-time collaborator Lisa A. Barnett), Shadow Man and Trouble and Her Friends, having previously been a three-time finalist (for Mighty Good Road, Dreamships, and Burning Bright). Trouble and Her Friends was also shortlisted for the Tiptree Award. Her most recent novel, The Jazz, was named to Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading List for 2000, and Point of Dreams, a joint project with co-author Lisa A. Barnett, was published by Tor in 2001 <www.pointsman.net>. Her first work of non-fiction, Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel, was published by Heinemann in 1997, and her monologue, "At RaeDean's Funeral," has been included in an off-off-Broadway production, Elvis Dreams, as well as several other evenings of Elvis-mania. She lives in New Hampshire with her partner of twenty-six years.

Jeff VanderMeer is a two-time winner (six-time finalist) of the World Fantasy Award, as well as a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. VanderMeer is the author of several surreal/magic realist novels and story collections, including City of Saints & Madmen, Veniss Underground, and Shriek: An Afterword, which have been or will soon be published by Pan Macmillan, Tor Books, and Bantam Books, among others. VanderMeer's most recent books have made the year's best lists of Publishers Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Weekly, Publishers' News, and Amazon.com. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction (1995-96) and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant (2004-2005). In 2001, Locus Online named him one of the ten best speculative fiction writers in the world. International bestselling author Peter Straub has called his work "brilliant...playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly, imaginative, while CNN.com has called it "Darkly distinctive! Not to be missed!" He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann. He is 37 years old.

Christopher_Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, and the Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers. Working with actress/writer/director Amber Benson, he co-created and co-wrote Ghosts of Albion, an animated supernatural drama for BBC online, from which they created the book series of the same name (www.ghostsofalbion.net). With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of the dark fantasy series The Menagerie as well as the young readers fantasy series OutCast, which was recently acquired by Universal Pictures. Golden and Sniegoski also wrote the graphic novel BPRD: Hollow Earth, a spinoff from the fan favorite comic book series Hellboy. Golden authored the original Hellboy novels, The Lost Army and The Bones of Giants, and edited two Hellboy short story anthologies.

Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University. His latest novel is The Myth Hunters, part one of a dark fantasy trilogy for Bantam Books entitled The Veil. At present, he is writing a lavishly illustrated gothic novel entitled Baltimore, or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, a collaboration with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. Other upcoming works include the novelization of Peter Jackson's King Kong. There are more than eight million copies of his books in print. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com

Laurie J. Marks is the author of Dancing Jack, The Watcher's Mask, and the "Children of the Triad" series (Delan the Mislaid, The Moonbane Mage, and Ara's Field). Her essays and book reviews have appeared in the SF Revu and other journals, and she teaches composition, creative writing, and science fiction at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Recently, Laurie caused a stir in the fantasy publishing world with her unfolding "Elemental Logic" series, which critics ranked with the works of Elizabeth Lynn and Ursula K. Le Guin. The first two books in the series, Fire Logic and Earth Logic, both won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

Laurie is a third generation Californian who inexplicably has chosen to live in a 112-year-old Victorian house on the outskirts of Boston with her wife, Deb Mensinger, their dog Widget—a Welsh corgi who can tell time—and their cats, Evil and Nikko. She has inherited the love of flowers that goes back at least four generations in her mother's side of the family; pedestrians and drivers alike have been known to stop dead in the street at the sight of her front yard. She particularly likes blue flowers, and every year she tries to grow Himalayan blue poppies from seed, so far with no success. She often goes tent camping along the coast of Maine and is gradually exploring the coast northward. She used to fantasize about eventually crossing the Arctic Circle and camping under the aurora, but she recently learned that it is possible to take a cruise to Antarctica, which is very bad news for her savings account.

When she's not writing, she spends a lot of time reading and commenting on other people's work. She is a member of the "Genrettes," a writing group with Delia Sherman, Rosemary Kirstein, and Didi Stewart. She is also a member of SFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association), the MTA (Massachusetts Teachers Association), and Broad Universe <http://www.broaduniverse.org/> (an organization for women writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror).

Shawna McCarthy has been working in the publishing industry for over 20 years, starting as an editorial assistant at Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and eventually becoming its editor in 1983. She won a Hugo Award as Best Professional Editor in 1984 for her work at Asimov's. From Asimov's she moved to Bantam Spectra as Senior Editor, where she acquired and edited books by Connie Willis, Robert Charles Wilson, Michaela Roessner-Herman, William Gibson and Dan Simmons, among others. After a leave to have her first child (Cayley, now 17), she went back to work as Senior Editor at Workman Publishing, where she acquired and published Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's bestselling Good Omens. After another leave to have another child (Hillary, now 13), she began work as an agent with Russ Galen at Scovil Chicak Galen Literary Agency. She left the agency in 1999 to start her own firm, The McCarthy Agency <http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/McCarthy/>, where she represents writers like Nicola Griffith, Robert Charles Wilson, Tanith Lee, Sarah Zettel, Wil McCarthy, Mark Anthony, Eric Flint, and many others. In her copious spare time, she is also the founding editor of the world's bestselling fantasy magazine, Realms of Fantasy <http://www.rofmagazine.com/>, which features fiction from the industry's finest writers and nonfiction from its finest academics and essayists. She resides in the Suburb Time Forgot in New Jersey, and has been married since 1983 to artist/author Wayne Barlowe.