Spotlight

Cynthia Sheppard has been creating artwork for books and games since the mid-2000s. Her illustrations are inspired by a late 19th-century realist painting and modern fantasy art, with a focus on emotional resonance and visual storytelling. She’s currently a senior art director at Wizards of the Coast, where she create worlds and has commissioned over 2,000 illustrations for the card game Magic: The Gathering.

She told us, “If I’ve ever ...Read More

Greg Ruth is a New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Boy and NDEH (with Ethan Hawke) and has worked making books and comics since 1993. He has published work through The New York Times, DC Com­ics, Fantagraphics Books, Mondo, Dark Horse, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hyperion, Simon and Schuster, the Criterion Collection, Slate, CNN, Penguin, Hachette, and Tor. He has created two music videos for Prince and Rob Thomas, ...Read More

Having created illustrations for many publish­ers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House and Hyperion/Disney, Omar Rayyan’s primary market was geared towards children’s and young adult’s magazine and books, doing cover and interior illustrations. He also illustrated several children’s picture books.

Other genres he has worked in include the gam­ing market, most notably for Magic: The Gathering, where he has done card art and concept work. Omar was also among the ...Read More

Victo Ngai is a Los Angeles based illustrator from Hong Kong, graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. “Victo” is not a boy nor a typo, but a nickname derived from Victoria – a leftover from the British colonization.

Ngai’s work appears in advertising, packaging, magazines, books, newspapers and animation, her clients include The New York Times, The New Yorker, Apple, Prophecy Wines, Johnnie Walker, American Express, Lufthansa ...Read More

Israel, I am informed, seems to be having an SF moment. Or, from the unexpectedly enthusiastic early reviews of the anthology I co-edited with Emanuel Lottem, Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, SF may be having an Israel moment.

As well it should. After all, the Jewish State drew inspiration from a knock-off of Edward Bellamy’s late 19th-century utopian romance, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, notably, Zionist ideologue ...Read More

Jason Kirk is a senior editor for Amazon Publishing’s 47North and Skyscape imprints. Books edited by Kirk have won the Arthur C. Clarke, British Science Fiction Association, and UTOPiA Book of the Year Awards, and have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick and Bram Stoker Awards. Prior to joining Amazon Publishing in 2014, Kirk worked in magazine publishing and music journalism for 15 years. Aside from his interest in ...Read More

Sarah Pinsker’s first professional sale was “20 Ways the Desert Could Kill You” in 2012. She followed that with the Sturgeon Award-winning “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind”, also her first Nebula Award-nominated story. She has since won the Nebula Award for novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her 40+ stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Uncanny, among others, ...Read More

Michelle Sagara was born in, and has spent all her life living in, what is now called Toronto. Her long-suffering husband and two children have learned that there’s nothing terribly mystical or magical about being a writer, although the experience of watching their mother has made imposter syn­drome and lack of critical objectivity about one’s work seem completely normal.

Reading is one of her life-long passions, and she is sometimes ...Read More

Tricia Reeks lives in the bear-infested mountains of Asheville, North Carolina with her mountaineer husband and her two ferocious French bulldogs. She is the founder of Meerkat Press, the co-editor of Behind the Mask: An Anthology of Heroic Proportions (a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2017) and Love Hurts: A Speculative Fiction Anthology.

Tell us about how your press was founded. Why did you decide to get into ...Read More

Andy Weir was first hired as a program­mer for a national laboratory at age 15 and has been work­ing as a software en­gineer ever since. He is also a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of sub­jects like relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. First novel The Martian was a bestseller and was adapted as a popular feature film. New novel Artemis is out this ...Read More