Sarah Pinsker’s short fiction has won the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards, and she’s been a finalist for the Hugo and numerous other awards. Small Beer Press will publish her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, will be published by Berkley in September. She lives in Baltimore with her wife, in a hundred-year-old house.

Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer, and the author of the young adult novels Dealing in Dreams, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on March 5, 2019, and The Education of Margot Sanchez, available now in bookstores everywhere. Her work has appeared in Elle, Nightmare Magazine, Tin House, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, to name a few. She lives in Los Angeles.

Henry Lien is a 2012 graduate of Clarion West. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He is the author of the Peasprout Chen series. Born in Taiwan, Henry currently lives in Hollywood. Hobbies include writing and performing campy science fiction/fantasy anthems, and losing Nebula awards.

S. A. Chakraborty is a speculative fiction writer from New York City. Her debut, The City of Brass, was the first book in The Daevabad Trilogy and has been short-listed for the Locus, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. When not buried in books about Mughal miniatures and Abbasid political intrigue, she enjoys hiking, knitting, and recreating unnecessarily complicated medieval meals for her family.

Andy Duncan’s short fiction has been honored with the Nebula, Sturgeon, and multiple World Fantasy awards. A native of Batesburg, SC, Duncan has been a newspaper reporter, a trucking-magazine editor, a bookseller, a student-media adviser, and, since 2008, a member of the writing faculty at Frostburg State University in the mountains of western Maryland, where he lives with his wife, Sydney.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has an MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Printer’s Row, and the Breakwater Review, where ZZ Packer awarded him the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. His debut collection, Friday Black is due out October 23rd from Mariner Books. He lives in Syracuse, New York.

John Joseph Adams might be Lightspeed’s editor and publisher, but for many of our readers—and heck, even the staff—he’s a bit of an enigma. How can he run two magazines, his own novel imprint, oversee the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, and create more amazing short fiction anthologies? Does he ever sleep? Mystified, we asked our staff interviewer to find out a bit more about JJA.

Born in New York and raised mostly in Houston, P. Djèlí Clark spent the formative years of his life in the homeland of his parents, Trinidad and Tobago. His writing has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Lightspeed, Tor.com, and print anthologies including Griots I and II, Steamfunk, Myriad Lands Volume 2, and Hidden Youth.

JY Yang is the author of The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. They are also a lapsed journalist, a former practicing scientist, and a master of hermitry. A queer, non-binary, postcolonial intersectional feminist, they have over two dozen pieces of short fiction published. They live in Singapore, where they work as a science communicator, and have an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. .

Lara Elena Donnelly is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, as well as the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers, where she now volunteers as on-site staff and publicity coordinator. In her meager spare time she cooks, draws, sings, and swing dances. After an idyllic, small-town Ohio childhood, she spent time in Louisville, Kentucky. She currently resides in Harlem, in a tower named after Ella Fitzgerald.