Seanan McGuire is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works.

She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.

She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.

Patrick Murphy is a celebrated BBC journalist and the longest-serving regular contributor to Sports Report. He started in November, 1981, specialising in cricket and football, and is famed for his many jousts with difficult members of the football industry.

Murphy has been involved in 44 sports books, including acclaimed biographies of Ian Botham and Brian Clough while co-writing books with, among others, Bob Willis, Graham Gooch, Viv Richards, Wasim Akram, Alan Donald, Imran Khan, Alec Stewart, Andrew Flintoff and Jack Russell. He has 37k followers on Twitter.

Carrie Vaughn is the New York Times Bestselling author of more than twenty novels and over eighty short stories. She's best known for the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings.

She's also a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world novels edited by George R.R. Martin. She has been nominated for various awards, including the Hugo and RT Reviewer Choice Awards.

Karen Lord was born in Barbados. She has been a physics teacher, a diplomat, a part-time soldier and an academic at various times and in various countries, before returning to Barbados, where she is now a writer and research consultant.

Her debut novel, Redemption in Indigo, won a slew of awards, including the Frank Collymore Literary Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for Best Debut Novel and the Mythopoeic Award, and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Redemption in Indigo, The Best of All Possible Worlds and its sequel, The Galaxy Game, are published by Jo Fletcher Books.

Monica Byrne grew up in Annville, Pennsylvania, as the youngest child of two theologians. She studied biochemistry at Wellesley, NASA, and MIT before pivoting to fiction and theatre. She is the author of the novel The Girl in the Road, winner of the 2015 Otherwise Award; as well as the plays Nightwork, What Every Girl Should Know, Tarantino's Yellow Speedo, and Ohio!, which have been performed around the world.

She also performed the first science fictional TED talk in Vancouver. YShe is based in Durham, North Carolina, and loves a good thunderstorm.

N. K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn-based author and the winner of three Hugo Awards for her novels The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.

She previously won the Locus Award for her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and her short fiction and novels have been nominated multiple times for Hugo, World Fantasy and Nebula awards, and shortlisted for the Crawford and the James Tiptree, Jr. Awards.

She is a science fiction and fantasy reviewer for the New York Times.

Naomi Kritzer is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and several novels for adults, including two trilogies for Bantam.

Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and a finalist for the Nebula Award. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jane Yolen is the author of more than 300 books, including children's classics such as Owl Moon and The Devi's Arithmetic, and adult novels such as Sister Light, Sister Dark. Her books and stories have won the Nebula Award, the Caldecott Medal, the National Jewish Book Award, and many other awards and accolades. She divides her time between Massachusetts and St. Andrews, Scotland.

Sarah Pinsker is a singer, songwriter and author. Her short stories have won the Nebula, Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick Awards. Currently finishing her second novel and fourth album, she lives with her wife in Baltimore.