Jonathan Strahan is a World Fantasy Award award-winning editor, anthologist, and podcaster. He has edited more than 70 books, is reviews editor for Locus, a consulting editor for Tor.com, and co-host and producer of the Hugo-nominated Coode Street Podcast. Jeffrey Ford (www.well-builtcity.com) is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab's Return, and Out of Body. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, The Best of Jeffrey Ford, and Big Dark Hole.

Ford's fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies from Tor.com to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories and has been widely translated. It has garnered World Fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Nebula awards and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Catherynne M. Valente (www.catherynnemvalente.com) is the New York Times bestselling author of forty works of speculative fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, the Orphan's Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times' Critics Choice, and Hugo awards.

She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.