Martha Wells has written many fantasy novels, including The Wizard Hunters, Wheel of the Infinite, the Books of the Raksura series (beginning with The Cloud Roads and ending with The Harbors of the Sun), and the Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer, as well as YA fantasy novels, short stories, and nonfiction.

Mike Allen is a co-founder of Axios. Mike is responsible for Axios editorial coverage, and writes the flagship daily newsletters, Axios AM and Axios PM. Mike was a co-founder of Politico, where he created the Playbook franchise and helped build the company for its first decade. He has been named several times to Vanity Fair's 'New Establishment' list. He is also an alumnus of TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The (Fredericksburg, Va.) Free Lance-Star. Allen is from Orange County, Calif., and graduated from Washington and Lee University.

Alaya Dawn Johnson has been recognized for her short fiction and YA novels, winning the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i," which also appears in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015), guest edited by Joe Hill.

Her debut YA novel, The Summer Prince (Arthur A. Levine, 2013), was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her follow up YA novel, Love is the Drug, won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. She is currently based in Mexico City, though travels frequently to New York.

Maya Deane (she/her) is a novelist, visual artist, and avid student of all the arts of civilization attributed to Inana by the first known writer, Enheduana. She would love to talk to you about the history of forks, the history of beer (and how the only woman who became king of Sumer was a bartender and brewer), cannabis-hotboxing Amazons in the archeological record, the top three most famous 18th century French trans women, how to cook ancient Canaanite food (hint: import bananas from India), and what it's like making friends with a scholarly feline. (Shout out to Apollo!) She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Camden MFA in creative writing.

Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of many publications, including the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014); and the novels, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017) and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018).

She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her work has been translated into eleven languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.