John Scalzi is one of the most popular and acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His debut, Old Man's War, won him science fiction's John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Lock In, and also Redshirts, which won 2013's Hugo Award for Best Novel. Material from his widely read blog The Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com) has also earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, A Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Bear lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts.

Lavie Tidhar (The Bookman; A Man Lies Dreaming; The Violent Century) is the author of the breakout Campbell and Neukom award-winning novel Central Station, which has been translated into ten languages.

He has also received the British Science Fiction, Neukom Literary, and World Fantasy awards. Tidhar was born in Israel, grew up on a kibbutz, has lived in south Africa, Laos, and Vanuatu, and currently resides in London.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a multiple Hugo winner, and a frequent finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards.

A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she spent five years touring nationally with puppet theatres. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters.

Jack Campbell is an adventurous cook and food writer based in Melbourne, Australia.

His first book The Little Bacon Cookbook managed to insert bacon into every conceivable dish.

In this book, Jack explores the king of the soups: ramen.

Daryl Gregory grew up in Chicago and has lived in various other cities within a few miles of the continent-spanning highway, Interstate 80, including his current home, Oakland, California.

He's been a high school teacher, a technical writer, and a programmer, and now writes full time, occasionally dabbling in comics and videogame scripts.

His short novel We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson award, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards.

The novel Afterparty was a National Public Radio and Kirkus Best Fiction book of the year. Spoonbenders is his first work of literary fiction.

Tad Williams is a California-based fantasy superstar. His genre-creating (and genre-busting) books have sold tens of millions worldwide, in twenty-five languages.

His considerable output of epic fantasy and science fiction book-series, stories of all kinds, urban fantasy novels, comics, scripts, etc., have strongly influenced a generation of writers: the Otherland epic now plays as an MMO on steam.

Tad is currently immersed in the creation of The Last King of Osten Ard, planned as a trilogy with two intermediary novels. He, his family and his animals live in the Santa Cruz mountains in a suitably strange and beautiful house.

Gardner Dozois was a highly acclaimed science fiction and fantasy editor and novelist who won fifteen Hugo Awards for his editorial work. He was Editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011. He passed away in May 2018.