Zen Cho: Gods, Ghosts, Gangsters & Grandmas

ZEN CHO was born in Selangor Malaysia in 1986 and grew up in Malaysia, apart from a year and a half spent in the US around age six. She moved to the UK at 18 for university, where she met her husband. She earned a law degree at Cambridge, and now works as a lawyer. She lives in the UK with her family.

Cho began publishing genre fiction in 2010, ...Read More

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Lavie Tidhar: Between the Cracks

LAVIE TIDHAR was born November 16, 1976 and raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Story “Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs” ...Read More

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TJ Klune: The Idea of Kindness

Travis John Klune was born May 20, 1982, in Roseburg OR, where he lived until his family relocated to Tucson AZ when he was 16. He moved to Virginia in 2013, where he worked in insurance before becoming a full-time writer in 2016.

Klune began publishing with Bear, Otter and the Kid (2011), and has authored numerous queer romances. His first work of genre interest was Burn (2012). Lambda Award ...Read More

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Stephen Graham Jones: Slasher Cycle

Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, was born in 1972 in Midland TX, and grew up in Texas apart, from a year in Colorado when he was a teenager. He attended Texas Tech University, studying English and philosophy, and attained a master’s degree at the University of North Texas. He earned his PhD in creative writing at Florida State University. Jones taught at Texas Tech before accepting ...Read More

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Cassandra Khaw: All-Consuming

Zoe Khaw Joo Ee was born August 31, 1984 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but has gone by Cassandra Khaw for the past 20 years. Khaw lived in Malaysia until age 25, then spent ten years traveling before settling in Montreal, Canada. Khaw worked as a journalist and video game writer in addition to writing fiction, and is currently a senior scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal.

Khaw began publishing short fiction in ...Read More

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Christopher Brown: Gonzo Transgressive

CHRISTOPHER TRACY BROWN was born June 10, 1964 in Des Moines IA. He grew up there, then went to Phillips Exeter, a prep school in New Hampshire, for high school (where his classmates included author Dan Brown; no relation). He spent a gap year traveling in Europe and working in Washington DC, then attended college at Tulane University in New Orleans, studying political economy, and spent a year at Oxford ...Read More

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A.C. Wise: Dark Darlings

Alison Campbell-Wise was born December 30, 1979 in Montreal, Canada. She moved to New Jersey 20 years ago with her husband, and they now live in the Philadelphia PA area.

She began publishing short fic­tion in 2005. Notable stories include Nebula Award finalists “How the Trick Is Done” (2019) and novella Catfish Lullaby, Sunburst Award winner “The Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)” ...Read More

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Charles Yu: Adjacent Realities

CHARLES CHOWKAI YU was born January 3, 1976 in Los Angeles CA. He attended UC Berkeley, where he stud­ied molecular and cell biology, graduating in 1997, and then went to Columbia Law School, earning his law degree in 2001. He worked as a lawyer until 2014, when he took a job writing for SF drama Westworld on HBO. He went on to write for other shows (including Lodge 49 and ...Read More

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Nghi Vo: Stories About Stories

Nghi Dong Vo was born December 4, 1981 in Peoria IL. She lived there until attending college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she studied political science and media studies. In 2007 she settled in Milwaukee WI.

Vo’s first story was “Gift of Flight” in 2007, and she has since pub­lished almost 20 stories in various publications. Her first book was Crawford Award winning novella The Empress of ...Read More

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Nnedi Okorafor: That Which Is Hers

Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor was born April 8, 1974 in Cincinnati OH to Igbo parents who emigrated from Nigeria in 1969. She earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of Illinois in 1996 and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University in 1999. She attended the University of Chicago, getting her MA in English in 2002 and complet­ing her PhD in 2007. She attended the Clarion writing workshop in ...Read More

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Isabel Yap: Full Circle

Victoria Isabel Santiago Yap was born May 23, 1990 in Manila in the Philippines and grew up in Quezon City. She at­tended Ateneo de Manila University for her first two years of undergrad, then moved to the US, where she earned a BS in Marketing from San­ta Clara University in 2013. That summer she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as secretary for the Clarion ...Read More

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Ursula Vernon: Shiny New Idea

Ursula Vernon was born May 28, 1977 in Japan to a military fam­ily. She lived in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and grew up mostly in Oregon, Arizona, California, and Minnesota, moving 18 times by age 20. She attended Macalester College in Saint Paul MN. Vernon has lived in North Carolina for the past 17 years.

An illustrator and author, Vernon has written extensively for children and also writes ...Read More

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Aliette de Bodard: Where Is It Written?

Aliette de Bodard was born November 10, 1982 in New York City to a Vietnamese mother and a French father. At age one she moved with her family to Paris, France, where she has lived ever since, apart from two years in London as a teenager. She attended the École Polytechnique, graduating in 2002 with a degree in applied mathematics, electronics, and computer science. She speaks both French and English ...Read More

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Jonathan Carroll: Mr. Breakfast

Jonathan Samuel Carroll was born January 26, 1949 in New York City to famed screenwriter Sidney Carroll and actress June Carroll. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1971 and married artist Beverly Schreiner that same year; they have a son, Ryder Carroll, inventor of the Bullet Journal. Carroll has lived in Austria since 1974, except for a two-year period in Hollywood working on films. He has taught literature at the ...Read More

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Brandon Sanderson: Ever More Epic

BRANDON SANDERSON was born December 19, 1975 and grew up in Lincoln NE. He attended Brigham Young University, where he studied biochemistry before switching to English literature. He paused his studies from 1995-97 to do missionary work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in South Korea, but returned and graduated in 2000. He earned his MA in English with a creative writing concentration in 2004.

Sanderson’s debut ...Read More

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Alix E. Harrow: Questions of Power

Alix E. Harrow was born November 9, 1989 in Idaho and grew up in Colorado and Kentucky. She went to Berea College at age 16, graduating in 2009 with a degree in history. She worked various jobs, including as a research assistant, cashier, housekeeper, instructional designer, and migrant farmworker, before earning a master’s in history at the University of Vermont. She taught history at Eastern Kentucky Univer­sity before becoming a ...Read More

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Andrea Hairston: Conjure the World

Andrea Hairston was born July 9, 1952, in Pittsburgh PA, and lived there until she moved to Massachu­setts to attend Smith College at 18, where she studied physics and math before switching to theater. She did graduate work at Brown, and has taught theater in the US and Germany. She is currently the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College, and the Artistic Director ...Read More

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Sheree Renée Thomas: A Kind of Wonder

Sheree Renée Thomas was born September 30, 1972, in Memphis TN. Her father joined the Air Force, and her family traveled extensively. After spending 20 years in New York, she has now settled back in her hometown.

Thomas is best known for her work as an editor, including Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fic­tion from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) – both won ...Read More

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Kim Stanley Robinson: Forward the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson was born March 23, 1952 in Waukegan IL, and grew up in Orange County CA. He earned a BA in literature from UC San Diego in 1974, a master’s in English from Boston University in 1975, and a Ph.D in literature from UC San Diego in 1982. He went to Clarion in 1975. His doctoral thesis was revised and published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick ...Read More

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Meg Elison: They’re Made Out of Stories

Meg Elison was born May 10, 1982. Her military family moved frequently, living in Europe and more than a dozen US states. She left home at 14 and dropped out of high school, but later attended community college and completed her degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

Elison’s debut, feminist postapocalyptic novel The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014), won the Philip K. Dick Award and launched the Road ...Read More

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Victor LaValle: Destroy the Reader

Victor LaValle was born February 3, 1972 in Manhattan and grew up in Queens. He earned an English degree from Cornell University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Co­lumbia University.

His debut collection was Slapboxing with Jesus: Stories. (1999). First novel The Ecstatic was published in 2002, fol­lowed by Shirley Jackson Award winner Big Machine (2009), Shirley Jackson Award finalist The Devil in Silver (2012), ...Read More

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Marshall Ryan Maresca: Choosing Magic

Marshall Ryan Maresca was born March 31, 1973 in Syracuse NY and grew up in upstate New York. He attended Penn State, where he got a degree in video and film production, and was active in the theater world. He settled in Austin TX, where he lives with his wife and son.

Most of Maresca‘s work is in the Maradaine world, an epic fantasy setting he has explored in four ...Read More

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Naomi Kritzer: CatNet

Naomi Katherine Kritzer was born April 23, 1973 in North Carolina and lived in Indiana and Texas before age five; she grew up in Madison WI and lived in London for a year at 13. She moved to Minnesota to attend Carleton College and remained there after graduating in 1995, settling in St. Paul. She is married with two children.

Kritzer’s first SF story was “Faust’s SASE” (1999), and she ...Read More

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Maria Dahvana Headley: From the Wilds

MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY was born June 21, 1977 in Estacada OR. She attended NYU, where she studied dramatic writing.

Headley’s first book was memoir The Year of Yes (2006), chronicling a year in which she said “yes” to every person who asked her on a date. Story “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” (2012) was a Nebula Award finalist, and other notable short works include novella The End ...Read More

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John Hornor Jacobs: The Notes You Don’t Play

John Hornor Jacobs was born January 5, 1971 in Little Rock AR. He attended a small liberal arts college in Arkansas and the Art Institute of Dallas, where he studied computer animation and multimedia. He lived briefly in Boston and now lives in Arkansas with his family, where he is a longtime designer in the advertising field.

Debut Southern Gods appeared in 2011 and was a Stoker finalist. Horror novel ...Read More

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Tochi Onyebuchi: Power Systems

Tochi Joshua Onyebuchi was born on October 4, 1987 in Northampton MA to Nigerian immigrant parents, and grew up in Newington and New Britain CT. He studied political science at Yale, earned a MFA in screenwriting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a master’s degree in global economic law from the Instituts d’études politiques in France. He attended law school at Columbia, and after graduation worked in civil ...Read More

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Veronica Roth: Chosen One

Veronica Anne Roth was born August 19, 1988 in New York and grew up in Barrington IL. She attended Carleton College for a year, then transferred to Northwestern University, where she studied and writing. In 2011, Roth married photographer Nelson Fitch.

Roth sold her debut novel, Divergent, while she was still an undergrad. The bestselling, young-adult SF series continued with Insurgent (2012), Allegiant (2013), and collection Four (2013), and ...Read More

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Steven Erikson: Undercurrents

Steve Rune Lundin, who writes fantasy as Steven Erikson, was born October 7, 1959 in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in Winnipeg. He trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist and is a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop; his thesis, a collection of linked stories, became his debut publication, A Ruin of Feathers (1991), written as Steve Lundin. He followed that with two more collections and debut novel This ...Read More

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Madeline Ashby: Foresight

Madeline Ashby was born April 24, 1983 in Panorama City CA and grew up in Washington State, outside Seattle, before relocating to Canada in her early twenties. She graduated from Seattle University in 2005, and went on to get an M.A. from York University in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on ”Japanese animation, cyborg theory, and fan cultures.” She then attended the Ontario College of Art and Design University, where ...Read More

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Tobias S. Buckell: Many Hands Lift

Tobias Samuel Buckell was born January 2, 1979 in Grenada in the West Indies, where he lived for the first decade of his life before relocating to the British Virgin Islands and then US Virgin Islands. He moved to Ohio in 1995 in the aftermath of Hurricane Marilyn, which destroyed the boat his family lived on. Buckell graduated from Bluffton University with an English degree in 2000. His short stories ...Read More

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C.L. Polk: The World Turned Upside Down

Chelsea Louise Polk was born September 28, 1969 in New Westminster, British Columbia. She spent her childhood there and in Surrey BC before moving to Ed­monton at age 13 and then to Calgary at 21.

She published a few pieces of short fiction beginning in the early 2000s as Chel­sea Polk. Her most recent story is “St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid” at Tor.com (2/5/20). Polk’s debut novel Witchmark (2018) ...Read More

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Elizabeth Bear: Everyone’s Utopia Is Someone’s Dystopia

 

Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky was born September 22, 1971, in Hartford CT. She attended the University of Connecticut, where she studied English and anthropology, though she did not take a degree. She has worked as a technical writer, stable hand, reporter, and in assorted office jobs, and has been writing full-time since 2006. She married Christopher Kindred in 2000, divorcing in 2007. She became involved with fantasy writer and firefighter ...Read More

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