M.J. Kuhn, author of the internationally bestselling Among Thieves and its new sequel, Thick as Thieves, is a fantasy writer by night and a mild-mannered marketing employee by day. She lives in the metro Detroit area with her very spoiled cat, Thorin Oakenshield.
Hayden Trenholm is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He has also been a public servant, an actor, a bartender, a freelance researcher and consultant, and a telemarketer for Alberta Ballet. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, anthologies such as The Sum of Us and Strangers Among Us, and on CBC radio.
His first novel, A Circle of Birds, won the 3-Day Novel Writing competition in 1993; it was later translated and published in French. Each book in his trilogy, The Steele Chronicles, was nominated for an Aurora Award. Stealing Home, the third book, was a finalist for the Sunburst Award.
Hayden has won five Aurora Awards – three times for short fiction and twice for editing anthologies. He purchased Bundoran Press in 2012 and was its managing editor until the press closed in 2020.
He lives with his wife and fellow writer, Liz Westbrook-Trenholm, in Ottawa, having retired in 2017 after fifteen years as a policy adviser to the Senator for the Northwest Territories. In 2022, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame.
Edo van Belkom is an award-winning Canadian author who began his career as a reporter for newspapers in and around Toronto, mainly covering crime and sports. His first sale as an author of fiction was a short story called “Baseball Memories” in 1990, which earned him his first Aurora Award nomination and was published in both the Year’s Best Horror Stories edited by Karl Edward Wagner and The Grand Slam Book of Canadian Baseball Writing.
He went on to win the Aurora Award for his novel Wolf Pack in 2005. The novel was subsequently awarded the Silver Birch Award from the Ontario Library Association after participating students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 voted it their favourite novel in 2006. The novel and its sequels has now been turned into a TV series from Paramount+, the first season of which released in January of this year.
The author of numerous novels and some 200 short science fiction, horror, and mystery short stories (and, mostly under the pen name Evan Hollander, erotica), Edo has also won the Bram Stoker Short Fiction Award.
Natalie Wright writes fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories. She’s the author of the award-winning H.A.L.F. series and Emily’s House, a young adult novel with more than two million reads worldwide, as well as the new Natalie also co-hosts the popular SFF podcast, Tipsy Nerds Book Club.
When she’s not writing, you might find Natalie with an Xbox controller in her hand, cooking French food for friends, or sipping a bourbon cocktail.
Natalie lives in Arizona with her husband and two ornery cats and visits her college-age son frequently in NYC.
Evan Graham consistently refuses to seek help for his lifelong sci-fi addiction. Since there are not enough stories currently in existence to satisfy him, he had no choice but to start writing his own. His Calling Void stories “celebrating the wonder and terror of the Unknown” have been featured in multiple anthologies. Tantalus Depths is his debut novel, set in the same world.
He has a bachelor’s in Education Studies from Kent State University and resides in rural northeast Ohio.
Daughter of two Cuban political exiles, M.C.A. Hogarth was born a foreigner in the American melting pot and has had a fascination for the gaps in cultures and the bridges that span them ever since. She has been many things—web database architect, product manager, technical writer, and massage therapist—but is currently a full-time parent, artist, writer, and anthropologist to aliens, both human and otherwise.
Her fiction has variously been recommended for a Nebula, a finalist for the Spectrum, placed on the Tiptree long list and chosen for two best-of anthologies; her art has appeared in RPGs, in magazines, and on book covers. M.C.A. Hogarth also served as Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) for three years.
Her current focus is new business models for artists and independent marketing and distribution innovations. Her first crowdfunded fiction project kicked off in 2004 before the word was even coined. M.C.A. has experimented with everything from “choose-your-own-adventure” style serials online to kickstarting creative projects and is looking forward to future experiments in using technology to bring art directly to the audience.
J.G. Gardner has a Ph.D. in Microbiology and is currently a researcher working on new ways to generate renewable energy using bacteria. While having published many technical papers on genetics and biochemistry, he has always wanted to write a novel about magic, wizards, and dragons.
After the birth of his children, he was inspired to fulfill that dream and used spare moments on nights and weekends to write his debut high fantasy novel, The Path From Regret, published by Loyola University of Maryland’s Apprentice House Press.
An hour-long chat with Rebecca Yarros, the USA Today– and New York Times-bestselling author of more than fifteen novels, including the just-released Fourth Wing, book one of the new fantasy series The Empyrean.
Rebecca Yaros is the USA Today– and New York Times-bestselling author of more than fifteen novels, with multiple starred Publishers Weekly reviews and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. A second-generation army brat, Rebecca loves military heroes and has been blissfully married to hers for more than twenty years. She’s the mother of six children, and she and her family live in Colorado with their stubborn English bulldogs, two feisty chinchillas, and a cat named Artemis, who rules them all.
Having fostered, then adopted, their youngest daughter, Rebecca is passionate about helping children in the foster system through her nonprofit, One October, which she co-founded with her husband in 2019.
An hour-plus chat with Brent Weeks, bestselling and award-winning author of the Night Angel Trilogy and the Lightbringer Series and the just-released Night Angel Nemesis, first book in a new series, The Kylar Chronicles.
In a small-town Montana school at age twelve, Brent Weeks met the two great loves of his life. Edgar Allan Poe introduced him to the power of literature to transcend time and death and loneliness. Fate introduced him to The Girl, Kristi Barnes. He began his pursuit of each immediately.
The novel was a failure. The Girl shot him down.
Since then–skipping the boring parts–Brent has written eight best-selling novels with the Night Angel Trilogy and the Lightbringer Series, won several industry awards, and sold a few million books.
Brent and his wife, Kristi, live in Oregon with their two daughters. (Yeah, he married The Girl.)
An hour-long chat with P.L. Stuart, bestselling Canadian fantasy author of The Drowned Kingdom Saga, inspired by Plato’s tale of the lost realm of Atlantis.
P.L. Stuart was born in Toronto and holds a university degree in English, specializing in Medieval Literature. He is an assistant editor with Before We Go Blog.
P.L.’s seven-bookThe Drowned Kingdom Saga chronicles flawed and bigoted Prince Othrun’s journey toward change and his rise to power in a new world after the downfall of his homeland, which is based on Plato’s lost realm of Atlantis. The bestselling first book, A Drowned Kingdom was mentioned in Kirkus Magazine’s 2021 Indie Issue among “Four Great Examples of the Genre” of fantasy and won the 2022 Picky Bookworm Award for Best Indie Book Based on Mythology. Book Two, The Last of the Atalanteans, was released in Spring 2022, and book three, Lord and King, is due out this spring.
