Nadia Afifi was born in Michigan and grew up in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. One of my favorite memories of growing up in the Middle East is having school days for heavy rain. Bahrain had almost no drainage system, so when it rained, the streets flooded. I remember turning on the radio in the morning […]

Galactic Journey is a Hugo award nominated blog site which, essentially, takes place fifty-five years ago. They discuss politics, landmark moments, and importantly, science fiction and fantasy, as if the unfolding of the events of fifty-five years ago were happening now. In fact, the family behind Galactic Journey—Gideon, Janice, and daughter Lorelei—have several rooms of […]

Kelly Barnhill was born in Minneapolis, MN. She went to St. Catherine University in St. Paul and double majored in English and theology. “I started college thinking I would be both a doctor and a nun, and four years later, I broke my parents’ hearts by driving away from my graduation in a rusty Oldsmobile […]

Ian McDonald was born in Manchester, England, the son of an Irish mother and Scottish father. He has lived in Northern Ireland since age five. He attended Bangor Grammar School and worked as head of development for a TV production company, including working on an iteration of Sesame Street, but set in Northern Ireland. McDonald […]

Ada Hoffmann was born in Kingston, Ontario—a university town about halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. Technically, they have been writing since they were five. “There was a little program on my school computer called ‘Word Processing for Kids,’ and I adored it and would just type away and write little nonsense stories about dinosaurs. I […]

Paul McAuley’s “Wagon, Passing” was published in the June 1984 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and he has been publishing short fiction fairly consistently ever since. His debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published in 1988 by Ballantine/Del Rey in the US and Gollancz in the UK. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction […]

Bora Chung Bora Chung was born in Seoul, Korea. She has earned an M.A. in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Slavic Literatures from Indiana University with a focus on modern Russian and Polish Literatures—specifically, utopian literature. She fell in love with strange, fantastic stories by Eastern European […]

Lisa Yaszek just might be an anthologist and scholar we all should be talking about more. Yaszek was born in Dearborn, Michigan and grew up in various Detroit suburbs. She could read fluently by the time she was three. She earned her bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, first putting in two […]

Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and spoke French before he spoke English. The son of a hardware engineer, Nayler grew up in Fremont, California. “As a kid I once had so many overdue books that one of the librarians showed up at my house to get them back. I grew up skateboarding, and still […]

Nisi Shawl has been reading since around age six. They have also been crafting entertaining stories since early childhood. A confession, from the autobiography on their website: “When I was little, I told my middle sister Julie convoluted tales of how I, a mermaid, had come to dwell in the small midwestern town of Kalamazoo, […]

Marie Vibbert was born at Booth Charity Hospital in East Cleveland, Ohio. She has lived in the greater Cleveland area since. She earned a bachelor’s from Case Western Reserve University and has also received “some boring technology certifications.” Vibbert met Brian Crick at Case Western, and they were married in 2001 at his mother’s house […]

Aleksandra (Ola) Hill was born in Toronto, Canada, to Polish immigrants, then moved to Poland for a few years before returning to Toronto for high school. She went to New York City to earn her BA at Columbia University in biology and English and, “aside from a year back in Toronto that I spent in […]

Tory Stephens lived in East Cambridge, Massachusetts until he was ten years old. It was an ideal place to live until the eighties crack epidemic happened. “My mother, brother, and I walked into our apartment one day and surprised some burglars. I remember seeing the microwave, TV, and AC all stacked on top of each […]

Ruthanna Emrys was born and raised on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She moved for college, grad school, and academic positions, eventually landing in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed outside Washington, DC. “I love DC; it feels like home, and I hope to stay living there for the rest of my life. I love the free museums that […]

Ashley Mackenzie was born in Victoria, BC and grew up in Vancouver. Their family moved to Edmonton when they were eight and, other than spending a few years in Toronto for university, they ended up moving back to help their family. Mackenzie took a year of online courses via the Academy of Art University in […]

Anya Ow was born and raised in Singapore. “At the time, Yio Chu Kang wasn’t as built over, migratory birds were more common, and you could fish in the canals closer to the aerospace park. It was a childhood that is perhaps less commonly possible in Singapore now that the country’s becoming more densely developed […]

Silvia Moreno-Garcia was born in Baja California, Mexico, and grew up in various places throughout the country. Her parents worked at radio stations, and she grew up surrounded by vinyl records. Her great-grandmother was from Hidalgo, and Moreno-Garcia drew inspiration from her stories and oral storytelling. Moreno-Garcia’s introduction to horror literature was via a collection […]

If you ask your favorite science fiction authors who their favorite science fiction author is, many of them will say: Eileen Gunn. Eileen Gunn was born in Dorchester, MA. “I grew up partly in Quincy, Mass., south of Boston, and partly south of there in Norwell, in the remote ’burbs, where we lived in a […]

When Sam J. Miller was in preschool, they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said, “Tyrannosaurus rex.” Miller was born in Hudson, NY, and he escaped when he was eighteen. Trained to be a butcher, the family shop went under; Walmart took over the town. Miller went to Rutgers […]

Samit Basu was born and raised in Kolkata in West Bengal, India. He earned a degree in economics at Presidency College and completed a course in broadcasting and documentary filmmaking at the University of Westminster in London. Basu’s debut novel, The Simoqin Prophecies, “India’s first ever SFF (science fiction/fantasy) genre novel in English,” was published […]

Dennard Dayle is a serious prankster. No, really. Even the news says this, so you know it’s true. Well, that program may not have used the term “prank,” but The New Yorker did. Dayle may be recognized by many for the pranks he’s pulled, but he’s also a successful fiction author with impressive sales and […]

Alex Shvartsman was born and grew up in Odesa, Ukraine, “or Odessa, USSR back then, the different spelling is not a typo.” He lived there for about fourteen years, then immigrated to New York City. He has lived in Brooklyn since 1991, and still lives there with his family, including a cat and a dog. […]

Rachel Cordasco was born and raised in Baltimore, MD. At age eight she encountered Star Trek: The Next Generation, which became her gateway to genre. “I wandered into the living room while the TV was on and was hooked by the episode about the crew of the Enterprise traveling back to nineteenth century America and […]

Djuna is the pseudonym for an enigmatic and prolific giant of Korean SF whose offline identity has remained completely unknown to the world during their decades-long career. Djuna has played an important role in the development of modern science fiction in South Korea, a living link between its earlier period as an online amateur scene […]

Regina Kanyu Wang was born and grew up in Shanghai, spending the first thirty years of her life there. She occasionally left for brief periods—the longest being one or two months—mainly for education or work. She did a writing residency in Las Vegas, summer school in Helsinki, and spent time in Nordic and Baltic fandom. […]

John Scalzi grew up in Southern California and went to school in Claremont. He graduated from the Webb School in 1987 and attended the University of Chicago, where he became editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. He graduated in 1991 with a philosophy degree. He returned to California and worked as a film critic, then as […]

Zoraida Córdova was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She immigrated to the US with her family on a family visa at age five or six, and grew up in Queens, New York. As a kid, farther back than she can remember, she watched X-Men, Gargoyles, Sailor Moon, and more, quickly discovering films such as Totoro, Merlin, […]

Max Gladstone was born in Concord, MA and grew up in Ohio and Tennessee. He studied Chinese Literature at Yale, then lived in China as a Yale Fellow, teaching for two years in the rural Anhui province. When he returned to the US in 2008, the economic crisis and its impact on people was an […]

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, published in 2020 by Penguin Random House imprint Vintage, came out to a host of stellar reviews, was a finalist for a Locus Award, and won a World Fantasy Award. The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (2009, Vintage) received similar praise, including landing as a […]

Daniel Abraham’s first publication was “Mixing Rebecca” in 1996 (in Ann VanderMeer’s The Silver Web magazine). That same year he graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in biology. He worked for a decade in tech support but continued to write and sell stories. “Veritas” came out in Warren Lapine’s Absolute Magnitude […]