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Since coming through Clarion West in 2005, Cat Rambo’s 300+ fiction publications have included stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and frequently appear in year’s best of collections. They work across genre, writing literary, thriller, science fiction, slipstream, fantasy, magic realism, historical, and humor with fluid ease, making them one of the leaders in American story writing. In 2013, Rambo’s short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” was a Nebula nominee and 2020 Rambo won the Nebula Award for their fantasy novelette Carpe Glitter, published by Meerkat Press. They have edited several anthologies as well as Fantasy Magazine, and received a World Fantasy Award nomination for their work with the latter. They have also written the writing book Moving from Idea to Finished Draft and co-edited Ad Astra: The SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook.

A frequent reader for podcasts, Rambo is part of the team behind the If This Goes On (Don’t Panic) podcast, and has worked with it since its beginning in 2020. They are a former two-term President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and continue to work with the organization as a mentor. Their most recent work is space opera Rumor Has It (Tor Macmillan, 2024); upcoming in 2025 is Wings of Tabat (Wordfire).

For more about Cat, as well as links to fiction and popular online school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, see their website at catrambo.com 

Georgia Jeffries is a writer of Emmy Award winning drama and critically acclaimed noir fiction. Honored with multiple Writers Guild Awards, Golden Globes and the Humanitas Prize, her work in film has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as “standing ovation television.” The Los Angeles Review of Books described her short stories in the national anthologies, Odd Partners and The Last Resort, as “firecracker tales” and “domestic tragedy brilliantly segueing into comic farce.” She has also written biographical profiles for HuffPost and UC Press, including “The Last Gun of Tibercio Vasquez,” which can be viewed on the KCET-TV website, Artbound. Born in the Illinois heartland, she worked as a journalist for American Film before writing and producing ground-breaking female-driven dramas, Cagney & Lacey, China Beach and Sisters. Her screenwriting career has been distinguished by extensive field research, from patrolling the mean streets of Rampart with the LAPD to crashing a Vegas bounty hunters’ convention to reporting from a Walter Reed Army Hospital surgical bay, each investigation the basis for one of her many docudramas and series pilots for CBS, ABC, NBC, HBO and Showtime. A cum laude UCLA graduate, Jeffries is a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she created the first undergraduate screenwriting thesis program at an American university.  The Younger Girl is her first novel.

Jan Gangsei is an award-winning author of books for young adults and tweens. Her debut YA thriller, Zero Day, was named to several state award lists and was one of Bank Street’s Best Books of the Year. She’s also penned several middle-grade books, including Project Me 2.0, The Wild Bunch, as well as series fiction under various pen names commissioned by book packagers and publishers. Her latest YA novel is Dead Below Deck 

LILLY DANCYGER is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship (2024), which Leslie Jamison called "fiercely felt and finely etched;" and the memoir Negative Space (2021), which was selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger. 

Dancyger's writing has been published by New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She writes the Substack newsletter The Word Cave.

A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Dancyger lives in New York City and teaches creative nonfiction at Columbia University School of the Arts and Randolph College. She has taught creative writing workshops for Tin House, Corporeal Writing, Catapult, Barrelhouse, and more; and she is a nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse Books. 

Adam Plantinga’s first book, 400 Things Cops Know, was nominated for an Agatha Award and won the 2015 Silver Falchion award for best nonfiction crime reference. It was hailed as “truly excellent” by author Lee Child and deemed “the new Bible for crime writers” by The Wall Street Journal. His second book, also nonfiction, is Police Craft. Plantinga is currently a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department assigned to street patrol. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, daughters, and Chow Chow named Ziggy. The Ascent is his debut novel. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, was a USA Today bestseller, and was recently optioned by Universal for television. 

KIRBY LARSON is the acclaimed author of many books for young people, including the 2007 Newbery Honor Book Hattie Big Sky; Dash, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction; Duke; Liberty; Code Word Courage; Audacity Jones to the Rescue, and Audacity Jones Steals the Show, and the new Shermy and Shake chapter book series, to name a few. 

QUINN WYATT has lived with Crohn’s for most of her life and is encouraged by all the progress that has been made over the years in the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases. This is her first book. A mother-daughter writing team, both Quinn and Kirby live in Kenmore, Washington.

Cherry Lou Sy is a writer and playwright originally from the Philippines and currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she has been an adjunct lecturer in the English and American Studies departments. Cherry is also a teacher with PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud. She has received fellowships and residencies from VONA, Tin House, and elsewhere. Love Can’t Feed You is her debut novel.

Andrew Bridgeman’s debut novel has it all – characters you fall in love with, a plot that keeps you racing from page to page, twists that leave you dumbfounded and thrilled, a satisfying conclusion, a final wish when you close the book that you could start all over again. Fortunate Son, by Andrew Bridgeman (Mission Point Press, September 24, 2024), a “propulsive, brilliantly executed thriller that will keep readers guessing . . .” (Kirkus Reviews) is more than just a wild, suspenseful ride. It’s a fascinating study of an American Family – of their secrets, corruption, greed, and betrayal. It’s a story about trust and sacrifice, and the risks we take in order to succeed.

Sebastian Smee is an art critic for the Washington Post and the author of "Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism" (Norton) and “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art” (Random House), which was translated into a dozen languages. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism while at the Boston Globe in 2011, after being runner up in 2008. Living in the UK between 2000 and 2004, he worked for the Daily Telegraph, The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times, Prospect, and The Spectator. In Australia, he worked as the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian. He was awarded the Rabkin Prize for art journalism in 2018 and was a MacDowell Fellow in 2021. He taught the Garis Seminar for Creative Non-fiction at Wellesley College between 2010 and 2022. 

 He has authored books on Mark Bradford and Lucian Freud and contributed essays to books on an array of other artists. He has been invited to speak at, among other places, Harvard University, Boston College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. 

As a mythopoeic scholar, Nadia Salem researches mythic structures in narrative throughout literature and film. By understanding mythology’s influence in creating classics, bestsellers, and blockbusters, she studies cross-cultural, genre-bending, marginalized stories for popular and political impact. Nadia has a doctorate in Creative Writing and has taught mythic structure at Georgetown and Northwestern Universities. She is a produced playwright, and the author of The Monomyth Reboot: A Transmodern Update for Mythopoeia.