Ted Kosmatka set his sights early on being a writer. This mostly involved having all his writing rejected, pursuing a biology degree, dropping out before graduation, and becoming a steelworker like his father and grandfather. Then the mill went bankrupt. At one point, he worked in a zoo. Now he works in video games, and his latest novel, The Flicker Men, came out last summer.

Michael Poore's work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, AGNI, and Asimov's Science Fiction. His novel, Up Jumps the Devil, hailed by the New York Review of Books as "an elegiac masterpiece," is available from HarperCollins. His story "The Street of the House of the Sun," originally published in The Pinch, was reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.