JONATHAN MABERRY (he/him) is a New York Times bestselling, Inkpot winner, five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
Relentless, Ink, Patient Zero, Rot & Ruin, Dead of Night, the Pine Deep Trilogy, The Wolfman, Zombie CSU, and
They Bite, among others. His V-Wars series has been adapted by Netflix, and his work for Marvel Comics includes The Punisher, Wolverine, DoomWar, Marvel Zombie Return and Black Panther. He is the editor of Weird Tales Magazine and also edits anthologies such as
Aliens vs Predator, Nights of the Living Dead (with George A. Romero),
Don’t Turn out the Lights, and others.
R. L. Stine is one of the bestselling children’s authors in history. His Goosebumps and Fear Street series have sold more than 400 million copies around the world. He has had several TV series based on his work, including the movie Goosebumps, which starred Jack Black as R. L. Stine himself. R. L. Stine lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, an editor and publisher.
Laurell K. Hamilton is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels, as well as the Meredith Gentry series.
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2011 at the age of 91, inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.
Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, "Live forever!" Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including
Wastelands and
The Living Dead. Recent books include
Cosmic Powers,
What the #@&% Is That?,
Operation Arcana,
Press Start to Play,
Loosed Upon the World, and
The Apocalypse Triptych. Adams is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. He is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines
Lightspeed and
Nightmare, and a producer for
Wired's The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast.VICTOR LAVALLE is the author of seven works of fiction: four novels, two novellas, and a collection of short stories. His novels have been included in best-of-the-year lists by
The New York Times Book Review,
Los Angeles Times,
The Washington Post,
Chicago Tribune,
The Nation, and
Publishers Weekly, among others. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids and teaches at Columbia University.
Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. He is well known for having created the character Conan the Cimmerian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.
Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Queen of Teeth, The Worm and His Kings, Your Mind Is a Terrible Thing, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, with dozens of short stories appearing in various publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their paranormal research is classified. Find her on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays
H.P. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890. He was self-educated and lived in his birthplace all his life, working as a freelance writer, journalist, and ghostwriter. His best work - including some sixty or so short stories - was published from 1923 onwards in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. He died in 1937, in poverty and virtually unknown; today he is recognized as one of the great masters of supernatural fiction.
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi won Pulitzer Prizes for his dramas, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays include The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and Night of the Iguana. He also wrote a number of one-act plays, short stories, poems and two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Moishe and the Age of Reason. He died in 1983 at the age of 72.
James Aquilone was raised on Saturday-morning cartoons, comic books, sitcoms, and Cap’n Crunch. Amid the Cold War, he dreamed of being a jet fighter pilot but decided against the military life after realizing it would require him to wake up early. He had further illusions of being a stand-up comedian, until a traumatic experience onstage forced him to seek a college education. Brief stints as an alternative rock singer/guitarist and child model also proved unsuccessful. Today he battles a severe chess addiction while trying to write in the speculative-fiction game.
