Annalee Newitz is the Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and the founding editor of io9. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of popular tech site Gizmodo. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). Her first science fiction novel, Autonomous, will be released from Tor in September 2017.

Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. Her most recent novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless, from John Joseph Adams Books. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy novels, as well as eighty-plus short stories. 

Yoon Ha Lee is a writer and mathematician from Houston, Texas, whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has published over forty short stories, and his critically acclaimed collection, Conservation of Shadows, was released in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Steven Barnes is a best selling, award-winning screenwriter and novelist from Los Angeles. He has written over twenty novels and worked on shows such as The Outer Limits, Stargate SG-1, and Baywatch. His true love is teaching balance and enhancing human performance in all forms: emotional, professional, and physical.