Olivie Blake is the New York Times bestselling author of the Atlas series and Alone with You in the Ether. As Alexene Farol Follmuth, she is also the author of the young adult romcom My Mechanical Romance. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, goblin prince/toddler, and rescue pit bull.

Saladin Ahmed is the Eisner Award–winning writer of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and The Magnificent Ms. Marvel. His novel Throne of the Crescent Moon was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. He lives with his children near Detroit. Find him on Twitter at @saladinahmed.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the Unstoppable trilogy, beginning with Victories Greater Than Death. She’s also the author of the short-story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can’t Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She’s won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford, and Locus awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she’s currently the science-fiction and fantasy book reviewer for The Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got seven hundred thousand views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Fran Wilde won a 2015 Nebula Award for her first novel, Updraft; she completed the trilogy with Cloudbound and Horizon in 2017. Her debut middle-grade novel Riverland won a 2019 Nebula Award and was named an NPR Best Book of 2019. The middle-grade novel The Ship of Stolen Words appeared in 2021 and books in her Gemworld series with tordotcom have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. Wilde’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Tordotcom, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine, and multiple year’s best collections. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, Tordotcom, and elsewhere. The manag­ing editor of The Sunday Morning Transport, Wilde holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in information architecture and interaction de­sign. She teaches for Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been waiting her whole life to write a Mon Mothma story.

Mary Kenney writes critically acclaimed videogames, books, and comics. She works at Insomniac Games, where she was on the writing team for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and she was a lead writer on Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. Her first book, Gamer Girls: 25 Women Who Built the Video Game Industry, was released in July 2022 to glowing reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. Before making games, she studied in the game design master’s program at New York University, and she teaches narrative design at Indiana University. She was an award-winning journalist with bylines in The New York Times, Salon, and Kotaku. When not writing or gaming, she can be found buried in a book, running a tabletop RPG, or trying to keep her forest of indoor plants alive.

Mike Chen is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Brotherhood, Here and Now and Then, A Quantum Love Story, and other novels, as well as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comics. He has covered geek culture, and in a different life, covered the NHL. A member of SFWA, Mike lives in the Bay Area with his wife, daughter, and many rescue animals.