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CHERAE LICHELLE CLARK was born August 10, 1990 in Oklaho­ma and grew up in Kansas City KS. She attended interna­tional school just outside London, England, then attended the University of Kansas as an undergrad. She earned her MFA at the University of Indiana, and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Fel­low under Dorothy Allison. Clark has worked as an English teacher, editor, and personal trainer. She lives in the UK.

Clark ...Read More

MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL was born Mary Robinette Harrison on February 8, 1969 in Raleigh NC. She attended Eastern Carolina University, major­ing in Art Education, with a minor in Theater and Speech. In 1991 she left for an internship at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta GA and never went back. She has been a professional puppeteer ever since. Kowal spent a year and a half working in Iceland on ...Read More

RAY NAYLER was born on June 5, 1976 in Alma, Quebec. When he was three years old, his family moved to California. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied modern literature and developed an interest in semiotics, graduating in 1999. He lived in the Bay Area and Toronto and worked various odd jobs before joining the Peace Corps and moving to Turkmenistan in 2003. He ...Read More

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS was born in Connecticut and grew up in the small town of Mansfield. She went to Cambridge University in England, studying English and Asian literature, and spent time studying abroad in China. She has lived in Hong Kong, Boston, and other places, and currently resides in San Francisco.

Anders began publishing SF with “Fertility” (1999) and has published well over 100 stories since then in various genres, ...Read More

AYIZE JAMA-EVERETT was born in 1974 in Harlem NY. He has trav­eled widely, including in Asia, Mexico, and North Africa. He has a master’s degree in divinity, another in clinical psychology, and recently finished his MFA in literature at UC Riverside. He currently lives in Oakland CA, where he works as a therapist.

Jama-Everett began publishing with SF novel The Liminal People (2011), launching a series that continued with The ...Read More

DENISE ANGELA SHAWL was born November 2, 1955 and grew up in Kalamazoo MI. (Their cousin Delores came up with the nickname “Nisi.ha”) At 17, Shawl moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan. After leaving the university, Shawl worked as a bookseller, au pair, cook, janitor, and artist’s model. Shawl settled in Seattle in 1996, worked on publicity for Clarion West, and currently serves on the workshop’s ...Read More

OSASUYI OKUNGBOWA, who writes as Suyi Davies Okungbowa, was born August 27, 1989 and grew up in Benin City, Edo, Nigeria. He earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Benin. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona, and now teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.

He began publishing SF with story “Breaking the Habit” (as Suyi ...Read More

ALEX JENNINGS was born November 30, 1979 in Germany, and lived in Botswana, the US, Suriname, and Tunisia. He settled in New Orleans 16 years ago.

Jennings studied at The Evergreen State College, where he met Octavia E. Butler, who encouraged him to apply to Clarion West. He attended the workshop in 2003, and began publishing short fiction of genre interest with “This is Mars” in 2005. His stories ...Read More

Annalee Newitz was born May 6, 1969 in Santa Monica CA, and grew up in Irvine. They attended UC Berkeley, where they completed a PhD in English and American Stud­ies in 1998; their dissertation was published as Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006). They began freelance writing in the mid-’90s, and have writ­ten full-time since 1999, mostly as a journalist focusing on technology and science. They ...Read More

SAAD Z. HOSSAIN was born April 22, 1979 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He studied English Lit and Commerce at the University of Virginia.

His debut novel was Baghdad Immortals (2013; as Escape from Baghdad!, 2015). Other novels include Djinn City (2017) and Cyber Mage (2021). Novella The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019) was an Ignyte Award finalist and has a sequel, Kundo Wakes Up, out this year. ...Read More

JULIE ELIZABETH STARINK was born April 11, 1955 in Exeter, Ontario, and lived with her family on the air force base in Centralia. She attended the University of Waterloo, where she studied biology and met future husband Roger Czerneda, married in 1976. She did her graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan, researching fish and the evolution of reproductive communication systems, and also attended Queen’s University. After that, she ...Read More

XIRAN JAY ZHAO is in their twenties, and was born in a small town in China, immigrating to British Columbia in Canada in their early teens.

Zhao attended Simon Fraser University, graduating in 2020 with a degree in biochemical disease research. They finished school at the height of the first COVID wave, and since they were unable to find a job due to the pandemic, they focused on writing and ...Read More

CHARLES DAVID GEORGE STROSS was born October 18, 1964 in Leeds, England. Stross began writing SF at age 12, and his earliest publica­tions were articles for roleplaying game magazines in the ’70s and ’80s. He earned a bachelor’s in pharmacy in 1986, qualified as a pharmacist in 1987, then enrolled at Bradford University (1989-90) for a post-graduate conversion degree in computer science. He worked as a technical writer and programmer ...Read More

PENG SHEPHERD was born April 12, 1986 and grew up in Phoenix AZ. She graduated college early and spent some time traveling, then earned her MFA at New York University. She has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and New York.

First novel The Book of M (2018) won the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Speculative Fiction in the Debut category. Second novel The Cartog­raphers ...Read More

SARAH GAILEY was born February 2, 1990 and grew up in Fremont CA. They studied theater at the American Academy for the Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles and managed a theater company in the East Bay for a few years.

Gailey began publishing work of genre interest with ‘‘Stars’’ in 2015, and made a big splash with alternate-history novella River of Teeth (2017), a Hugo and Nebula Award finalist, and ...Read More