Daniel José Older is the Brooklyn-based writer, editor, composer, and New York Times–bestselling author of Salsa Nocturna, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, and the Young Adult novel Shadowshaper, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s “80 Books Every Person Should Read.” His most recent novel is Shadowhouse Fall, sequel to Shadowshaper.
Born into a Navy family, Kit Reed moved so often as a kid that she never settled down in one place. Author of sixteen novels, the most recent of which is Mormama, which unfolds in a deteriorating mansion on a once-distinguished street in Jacksonville, Florida. Other recent books include the collection The Story Until Now. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. A longtime member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University and lives in Middletown, Connecticut.
Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo and brought up in Manhattan. The author of numerous short stories, her adult novels include Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove (which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award), and, with Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Her novels for younger readers are Changeling, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, The Freedom Maze, and The Evil Wizard Smallbone. Sherman lives in New York City with her wife and sometime collaborator, Ellen Kushner, loves to travel, and writes in cafés wherever in the world she finds herself.
Author, screenwriter, and musician John Shirley spent some of the eighties in New York City where, with his band, Obsession, he signed a record deal, made a record, and played at CBGB, the Pyramid, and other NYC venues. The city in the 1980s is the scene and inspiration for his terrifying cult classic novel Cellars. He is the author of more than forty novels and many of his numerous shorter works have been gathered in nine collections. He lived in California for many years and now resides in Washington State near Portland, Oregon.
Peter Straub is the New York Times–bestselling author of nineteen novels. His shorter fiction has been gathered in five collections. Straub is the editor of numerous anthologies, including the two-volume The American Fantastic Tale from the Library of America. He was born in Wisconsin, eventually got an MA from Columbia, lived in Dublin and London, and in the early eighties moved with his family into a brownstone on the Upper West Side where they lived until recently. He and his wife, Susan, now live in Brooklyn.