Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (45 page)

Christopher Barzak
grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural elementary and middle schools. His stories have appeared in many venues, including
Nerve
,
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
,
Teeth
,
Asimov’s
, and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
. His first novel,
One for Sorrow
, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy. His second book,
The Love We Share Without Knowing
, is a novel-in-stories set in a magical realist modern Japan, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. He is also the co-editor of
Interfictions 2
, and has done Japanese-English translation on
Kant: For Eternal Peace
, a peace theory book published in Japan for Japanese teens. Forthcoming in August 2012, his collection,
Birds and Birthdays
, will be published by Aqueduct Press, and in March 2013, his full length short story collection,
Before and Afterlives
, will be published by Lethe Press. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

Holly Black
is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Her titles include the Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), the Modern Faerie Tale series, the Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and the Curse Workers series
.
Holly has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

Amanda C. Davis
is a combustion engineer who loves baking, gardening, and gory low-budget slasher films. Her short fiction has appeared in
Shock Totem, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
, and others. You can follow her on Twitter (@davisac1) or read more of her work at www.amandacdavis.com.

Australian writer
Felicity Dowker
has won and/or been shortlisted for numerous awards for her writing and reviews, including the Ditmar, Chronos, Aurealis, and Australian Shadows Awards. Along with fellow writers Alan Baxter and Andrew J. McKiernan, Felicity is co-founder and contributing editor at dark fiction news and reviews site Thirteen O’Clock (www.thirteenoclock.au). Felicity’s debut short story collection
Bread and Circuses
was released in June 2012 by Ticonderoga Publications. Felicity’s work can be found all over the place, most recently in
The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror
Volume 2. Like most writers, Felicity is currently working on a novel.

Amanda Downum
lives near Austin, Texas, in a house with a spooky attic. Her day job sometimes allows her to dress up as a giant worm. She is the author of
The Drowning City, The Bone Palace,
and Kingdoms of Dust
, published by Orbit Books. Her short fiction has appeared in
Ideomancer, Realms of Fantasy
, and
Weird Tales
. For more information, visit www.amandadownum.com.

Cate Gardner
is a British horror and fantastical author with over a hundred stories published. Several of those stories appear in her collection,
Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits.
She is also the author of two novellas:
Theatre of Curious Acts
(Hadley Rille Books) and
Barbed Wire Hearts
(Delirium Books). You can find her on the web at www.categardner.net.

Kij Johnson
writes science fiction, fantasy, and slipstream literature, and is a winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She teaches at the University of Kansas. She splits her time between Lawrence and Seattle.

Barry B. Longyear
is the first writer (and maybe the only writer) to win the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, all in the same year. In addition to his acclaimed
Enemy Mine
series, his works include numerous short stories, the
Circus World
series, the
Infinity Hold
series, and novels ranging from
Sea of Glass
to
The God Box
, as well as his much praised
Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop-I.
His online writing seminar,
The Write Stuff,
is now available as a trade paperback and in Kindle format. His recent works include
Jaggers & Shad: ABC is for Artificial Beings Crimes,
the complete award-winning series that appeared in
Analog,
in addition to two previously unpublished tales;
Dark Corners,
his hardest hitting collection of stories from the dark side; and
The Enemy Papers
(all three novels of the
Enemy Mine
series, including the never-before-published
The Last Enemy
and the Drac bible,
The Talman
). A complete list of his awards, books, short stories, and other writings is available on his website, www.barrylongyear.com.

Andrew J. McKiernan
is a writer and illustrator living and working on the Central Coast of NSW, Australia. First published in 2007, his stories have since been nominated for multiple Aurealis, Australian Shadows, and Ditmar Awards and been reprinted in a number of Year’s Best anthologies. His work can be found here and there, like a slow sprouting fungus, www.andrewmckiernan.com.

Jessica Reisman’
s stories have appeared in an array of magazines and anthologies. Five Star Speculative Fiction published her first novel,
The Z Radiant
. She dreams awake, has visions asleep, and enjoys tea and artful cocktails while living in Austin, TX, with well-groomed cats. For more about her fiction, visit www.storyrain.com.

Ken Scholes
is the award-winning author of over forty short stories and three novels. His epic fantasy series, the Psalms of Isaak, is being published to great critical acclaim by Tor in the US and by multiple publishers overseas. Scholes is also a winner of the Writers of the Future contest. He lives in Saint Helens, Oregon, with his wife and daughters. He invites readers to learn more about him and his writing at www.kenscholes.com.

Douglas Smith
is an award-winning author of speculative fiction, with over a hundred short story sales to professional markets in thirty countries and two dozen languages. His collections include
Chimerascope
(ChiZine Publications, 2010),
Impossibilia
(PS Publishing, 2008), and
La Danse des Esprits
(Dreampress, 2011), a translated fantasy collection published in France. Doug has twice won Canada’s Aurora Award, and has been a finalist for the international John W. Campbell Award, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Bookies Award, Canada’s juried Sunburst Award, and France’s juried Prix Masterton and Prix Bob Morane. A multi-award winning short film has been made based on Doug’s story “By Her Hand, She Draws You Down,” and films based on other stories are also in the works. Doug’s website is smithwriter.com and he tweets at twitter.com/smithwritr.

Peter Straub
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than a dozen novels, most recently
A Dark Matter
. He has won the Bram Stoker Award for his novels
, Lost Boy Lost Girl
and
In the Night Room
, as well as for his recent collection,
5 Stories
. Straub was the editor of the two-volume Library of American anthology
The American Fantastic Tale
. He lives in New York City.

E. Catherine Tobler
lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in
SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones
,
and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at
Shimmer Magazine
.

Genevieve Valentine
’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Lightspeed
, and
Apex
, and in the anthologies
Federations, The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, After, Teeth,
and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in
Lightspeed, Tor.com
, and
Fantasy Magazine
, and she is the co-author of
Geek Wisdom
(out from Quirk Books). Her first novel,
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti
, won the 2012 Crawford Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.

Jeff VanderMeer
’s fiction has been published in over twenty countries. His books, including the best-selling
City of Saints and Madmen
and
Finch
, have recently made the year’s best lists of the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Washington Post
, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
. VanderMeer’s surreal, often fantastical fiction, has won two World Fantasy Awards and an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship and Travel Grant, along being a finalist for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and many others. He regularly reviews books for the
New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review
, and the
Washington Post
while his short fiction has appeared in
Conjunctions, Black Clock, Arc, Tor.com
, among others. With his wife Ann, the Hugo Award-winning editor of
Weird Tales
, he has edited such iconic anthologies as
Steampunk, Steampunk Reloaded, The New Weird
, and
The Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases,
and
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
. He is the author of the definitive
The Steampunk Bible
. VanderMeer is the assistant director for the unique teen SF/Fantasy writing camp Shared Worlds, based at Wofford College. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Howard Waldrop
, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include
Them Bones
and
A Dozen Tough Jobs
, and the collections
All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
,
Night of the Cooters
, and
Going Home Again
. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”

Deborah Walker
grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: http://deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com. Her stories have appeared in
Nature’s Futures, Cosmos
and
Daily Science Fiction.

Eric Witchey
has made a living as a freelance writer and communication consultant for over twenty years. In addition to many non-fiction titles, he has sold more than seventy short stories and two novels. His stories have appeared in six genres on five continents, and he has received recognition from New Century Writers, Writers of the Future, Writer’s Digest, The Eric Hoffer Prose Award program, and other organizations. His How-To articles have appeared in
The Writer Magazine
,
Writer’s Digest Magazine
, and other print and online magazines. When not teaching or writing, he spends his time fly fishing or restoring antique, model locomotives.

About the Editor

Ekaterina Sedia
resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels,
The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone,
The House of Discarded Dreams,
and
Heart of Iron
were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to
Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean,
and
Clarkesworld
, as well as numerous anthologies, including
Haunted Legends
and
Magic in the Mirrorstone
. She is also the editor of
Paper Cities
(World Fantasy Award winner),
Running with the Pack,
and
Bewere the Night
, as well as forthcoming
Bloody Fabulous
and
Willful Impropriety
. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

OTHER BOOKS BY THE EDITOR

Running with the Pack

Paper Cities

Bewere the Night

Bloody Fabulous

Willful Impropiety