Laird Barron
Laird Barron is an award-winning author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, and dark fantasy genres. His work has appeared in such publications as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound!, and Black Wings: Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, as well as numerous year’s best anthologies. Barron’s debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was published in 2007 by Night Shade, followed by Occultation in 2010. Both collections won Shirley Jackson Awards. Other award nominations include the Crawford Award, Sturgeon Award, International Horror Guild Award, World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, and Locus Award. His first novel, The Croning, will be published in 2012 by Night Shade. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in the mountains of Montana.
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Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She decided she wanted to be a writer when she was six years old, when she began stapling together hand-illustrated booklets about dinosaurs and race horses. Despite some side expeditions in her career path, this desire has never wavered. Bear’s first novel, Hammered, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel. She has since written over twenty novels, as well as close to 100 shorter works. The Chains That You Refuse, a collection of her short fiction was published by Night Shade in 2006. Bear is the recipient of several major awards, including the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2008 Hugo for “Tideline,” and the 2009 Hugo for “Shoggoths in Bloom.” She is a native New Englander who spent seven years in the Mojave Desert before returning to a land where it sometimes rains. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it.
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John Hornor Jacobs
John Hornor Jacobs is a novelist, among other things. He has worked in advertising for the last fifteen years, played in bands, and pursued art in various forms. Jacobs began writing, seriously, in 2007. In Spring 2010 he co-founded Needle: A Magazine of Noir. Jacobs’ first novel, Southern Gods, was published by Night Shade in August 2011. His second novel, This Dark Earth, will be released in July 2012 by Gallery/Pocket Books. A young adult series from Carolrhoda Labs, The Incarcerado Trilogy, comprised of The Twelve Fingered Boy, Incarcerado, and The End of All Things, is forthcoming.
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Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín R. Kiernan was born in Dublin, Ireland, but grew up in rural Alabama. She studied vertebrate paleontology, geology, and biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Kiernan’s first published novel, 1998’s International Horror Guild Award winner and Stoker finalist Silk, earned praise from critics and such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, and Poppy Z. Brite. Her most recent novel, World Fantasy finalist The Red Tree, was published in 2009. Kiernan is also prolific short fiction author, and her stories have been collected in eleven volumes, most recently in Two Worlds and in Between, released in August 2011. Her stories include IHG Award winners “Onion” and “La Peau Verte,” SF novella The Dry Salvages, and IHG finalists “The Road of Pins” and “Bainbridge.” Kiernan now lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn, where she is working on a new novel.
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John Langan
John Langan is a writer of weird fiction who has been called “an emerging master of the elegant macabre” by Locus. His stories have appeared in various anthologies, including The Living Dead, By Blood We Live, Supernatural Noir, Ghosts by Gaslight, and Blood and Other Cravings, as well as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Langan’s debut collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, was a 2008 Bram Stoker Award nominee. His first novel, House of Windows, was published by Night Shade in 2009. A new novel, The Fisherman, and another collection, Technicolor and Other Revelations, are forthcoming. Langan is completing his dissertation, Lovecraft’s Progeny, a consideration of Lovecraft’s influence on Fritz Leiber, Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Thomas Ligotti, at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has also published numerous reviews and critical essays on weird writers. Langan teaches Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz, and lives nearby with his wife, Fiona, their son David, a dog, three cats, and whatever else his son brings home. [Photo ©2011 by Ellen Datlow]
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Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author. While something of a cult figure, he has seen high praise as one of the most effective and unique horror writers of recent decades, often compared to Poe, Borges, Kafka, and Lovecraft. Ligotti generally avoids the explicit violence common in recent horror, preferring to establish a disquieting, pessimistic atmosphere through the use of subtlety and repetition. Lovecraft is an important touchstone for Ligotti. Other influences include M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen, known for their subtlety and implications of the cosmic and supernatural in their stories. After Ligotti’s first published story, “The Chymist,” appeared in Nyctalops in 1981, his reputation began to grow among aficionados of weird fiction, culminating in the landmark volume Songs of a Dead Dreamer in 1985. His additional fiction collections unequivocally cemented his status as one of the most important voices in the field. Ligotti is the recipient of several awards, including three Bram Stoker Awards. New short stories can often be found in Weird Tales.
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Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Silvia Moreno-Garcia was born and raised in Mexico. She moved to Canada several years ago and now lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. Moreno-Garcia writes speculative fiction, from magic realism to horror, and her short stories have appeared in professional publications such as Fantasy Magazine and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She is also the publisher of Innsmouth Free Press, a Canadian micro-publishing venture specializing in horror and dark speculative fiction, which publishes several high-quality anthologies and novels annually. Moreno-Garcia co-edited the latest anthology from Innsmouth Free Press, Historical Lovecraft, a unique anthology blending historical fiction with horror, and pushing the envelope of Lovecraftian lore. In 2011, she won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize in the Emerging Writer category, sponsored by Gloria Vanderbilt and Exile Quarterly.
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Tim Pratt
Tim Pratt is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer and poet whose work has appeared in such publications as The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Asimov’s. His debut collection, Little Gods, was published in 2003, followed by his first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, in 2005. Pratt won a Hugo Award in 2007, and in 2008 his collection from Night Shade, Hart & Boot & Other Stories, was a World Fantasy Award finalist. He has also been nominated for Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. In 2004 Pratt was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is currently writing an ongoing series of urban fantasy novels, both published and serialized online, under the name T.A. Pratt that began in 2007 with Blood Engines. Pratt lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Heather Shaw and their son River. By day he works as a senior editor at Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, where, among other things, he write the obituaries.
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Cherie Priest
Cherie Priest is the author of ten novels, including the steampunk pulp adventures Dreadnought, Clementine, and Boneshaker. Boneshaker was nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award; it was a PNBA Award winner, and winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Priest also wrote Bloodshot for Bantam Spectra; Fathom and the Eden Moore series from Tor; and three novellas published by Subterranean Press. In addition to all of the above, she is a newly minted member of the Wild Cards Consortium – and her first foray into George R. R. Martin’s superhero universe, Fort Freak (for which she wrote the frame story), debuted in June 2011. Priest’s short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in such fine publications as Weird Tales, Subterranean Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Stoker-nominated anthology Aegri Somnia from Apex. Though she spent most of her life in the southeast, she presently lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and a fat black cat. [Photo ©2010 by Caitlin Kittredge]
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W. H. Pugmire
W. H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since 1973, with stories published in such magazines as Space & Time, Deathrealm, and Weird Tales. He specializes in prose and poetry that is set in the fictive world of H. P. Lovecraft or in his own invented locale, Sesqua Valley. Unlike Lovecraft’s cosmic fiction, Pugmire’s work is utterly supernatural, at times outlandishly so. His prose style reflects the keen influences of Lovecraft, Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, just as his poetry is tainted by his profound love for the Works of Shakespeare. Preferring to work with small press publishers, Pugmire’s recent collections include Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams, and The Tangled Muse, a deluxe illustrated retrospective of his work published by Centipede Press in October 2010. His stories have also appeared in many major horror anthologies, most recently S. T. Joshi’s 2010 anthology of modern Lovecraftian fiction, Black Wings. Pugmire currently resides in Seattle, Washington.
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Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., is the author of the Lovecraftian novel Nightmare’s Disciple, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror and S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings and Spawn of the Green Abyss and many anthologies edited by Robert M. Price. His highly–acclaimed short story collections, Blood Will Have Its Season and SIN & ashes were published by Hippocampus Press in 2009 and 2010 respectively and as E-Books. Pulver’s work has been praised by Thomas Ligotti, Ellen Datlow, Laird Barron, S.T. Joshi, and many other notable writers and editors. He is currently editing two anthologies for Miskatonic River Press. A Season in Carcosa and The Grimscribe’s Puppets will be released in 2012. Pulver’s new novel, The Orphan Palace will be released by Chomu Press in October 2011.
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Charles Stross
Charles Stross is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror, and fantasy. He specializes in hard science fiction and space opera. Born in Leeds, England, Stross studied in London and Bradford, earning degrees in pharmacy and computer science. Over the next decade and a half he worked as a pharmacist, a technical writer, a software engineer, and eventually as a prolific journalist covering the IT industry. While Stross’s first published short story, “The Boys,” appeared in Interzone in 1987, his short fiction didn’t attract wide attention until the late 1990s. His first published novel, 2004 Hugo nominee Singularity Sky, was followed by more than fifteen published novels, including Accelerando and Halting State. Stross’s works have received numerous nominations and awards, including the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella. In 2009 he became the first author to have a novel on the Hugo shortlist in six consecutive years. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.
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Molly Tanzer
Molly Tanzer is the Managing Editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, as well as a freelance writer and editor. Her fiction has appeared in Running with the Pack, Crossed Genres, and Historical Lovecraft, and is forthcoming in Future Lovecraft, Lacuna, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Tanzer’s nonfiction, including interviews and reviews, has appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine. She earned her degree of Artium Baccalaureus in Art History from Rollins College in 2004, and completed her Master’s in Humanities at Florida State University in 2009. Tanzer is a fan of the semicolon, an out-of-practice translator of ancient Greek, an infrequent blogger, and an avid admirer of the novels of eighteenth century England. Currently, she resides in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat.
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