Steve Brusatte
Episode 97 : Steve Brusatte on Dinosaurs and the People Who Love Them
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Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist who hunts and writes about dinosaurs. He is on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, but grew up in the Midwestern USA. Steve has traveled around the world digging up dinosaurs and, working with many international colleagues, has named more than 15 new species, including the tyrannosaur 'Pinocchio rex' (Qianzhousaurus) and the raptor Zhenyuanlong. He has written several books for kids and adults, most notably the adult pop science book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018), which was a New York Times bestseller in the USA, Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, and Globe & Mail bestseller in Canada, and won the Goodreads Readers Choice Award for Science & Technology in 2018. His work is covered often by the popular press and he has appeared on several television shows, such as the National Geographic extravaganza T. rex Autopsy, where he was part of the team that dissected a scientifically accurate life-sized model of a T. rex.
Learn more about Steve on his website or his faculty page at the University of Edinburgh, or follow him on Twitter.
Becky Chambers
Episode 111: Becky Chambers on Queering Science Fiction
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Becky Chambers is a science fiction author based in Northern California. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series, which currently includes The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few. Her books have also been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the Women's Prize for Fiction, among others. Her most recent work is To Be Taught, If Fortunate, a standalone novella.
Visit Becky’s website.
Chris Cokinos
Episode 76: Solaris
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Christopher Cokinos is an American poet and writer of nonfiction on nature and the environment. Heis the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Tarcher/Penguin); The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars (Tarcher/Penguin); and Bodies, of the Holocene (Truman). In 2016, the University of Arizona Press published his co-edited anthology (with Eric Magrane) The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, which won a Southwest Book of the Year Award.
Learn more about Chris at the University of Arizona, via the Whiting Award, or at the Rachel Carson Center in Germany.
CSE Cooney
Episode 108 : CSE Cooney, Our Lady of the Velociraptor Ferris Wheel
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C.S.E. Cooney is an audiobook narrator, the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories. Her work includes the Tor novella Desdemona and the Deep, three albums: Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir, and a poetry collection: How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features her Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction can be found in Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the Sword and Sonnet anthology, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and elsewhere.
David Curtis
Episode coming soon!
David Curtis is an award winning illustrator and book designer living in Brooklyn, NY, where he works on Middle Grade and YA titles for HarperCollins Children’s books. While illustrating and designing his own covers, he’s also had the opportunity to work with other amazing artists to create effective and memorable book designs.
Eboni J. Dunbar
Episode 126: Eboni J. Dunbar on Queering High Fantasy, Exploring Inequities, & Vulnerable Leadership
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Eboni J Dunbar (she/her) is a queer, black woman who writes queer and black speculative fiction. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner. She received her BA from Macalester College in English and her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She is a VONA Alum, a former associate editor for PodCastle, a managing editor for FIYAH Literary Magazine and a freelance reviewer.
Eboni loves to read SFF with a particular focus on black, queer characters and authors. She also enjoys reading romance, YA and some poetry.
Her work can be found in FIYAH Magazine, Drabblecast, Anathema: Spec from the margins and Nightlight Podcast. She also has a forthcoming novella, Stone and Steel, from Neon Hemlock Press, coming Fall 2020
Visit Eboni’s website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Jonathan Michael Erickson
Episode 92: Jonathan Michael Erickson on His Relics of Andromeda Series
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Jonathan is a writer living in Portland whose latest book, Relics of Andromeda, the first of an epic science fiction series, came out earlier this year. His work focuses on technology, spirituality, and human relationships, and reflects a life that has taken him from Berkeley to New York City to the Esalen Institute for Human Potential and through a PhD in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Both a sequel to Relics of Andromeda and a book drawing on his PhD research are due out later this year.
Visit Jonathan at his website.
Sarah Gailey
Episode 116 - Sarah Gailey (ROUND 2) on Fascist-Fighting Horseback Queerbrarians
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Episode 85: Sarah Gailey on Fighting Fascism & Queering All the Genres
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Hugo award winner Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they won a Hugo award for their work at Tor.com and Barnes & Noble. Their most recent fiction credits include Vice and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was published in 2017 via Tor.com and was a 2018 Hugo and Nebula award finalist. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019; their latest novella, Upright Women Wanted, was published by Tor.com Publishing in February 2020. Their Young Adult novel debut, When We Were Magic, is out March 2020.
Visit Sarah at their website, or follow them on Twitter.
Molly Gloss
Episode 98 : Molly Gloss on a Career of Wildernesses
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Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen, which came out in July. She writes both realistic fiction and science fiction, and her novels have received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Her short story “Lambing Season” appeared in The Best of the Best: Twenty Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, ed. Gardner Dozois. “The Grinnell Method” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for the short story.
Visit Molly at her website, or follow her on Twitter.
AJ Hackwith
Episode 112 - AJ Hackwith on Finding One's Family ... in Hell's Library
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A.J. Hackwith is a queer writer of fantasy and science fiction living in Seattle her partner, her dog, and her ghosts. She is the author of The Library of the Unwritten, the first book in the Hell's Library series. Its sequel, The Archive of the Forgotten is out this October. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writer's workshop and her work appears in Uncanny magazine and assorted anthologies.
Visit AJ’s website, and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
Leigh Harlan
Episode 125: Leigh Harlan on Punks, Shifters, and Finding Family
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Leigh Harlen is a queer, non-binary writer who lives and works in Seattle with their partner, a very goofy dog named Anya, and a mischief of rats. Their non-writing hobbies include petting strangers’ dogs, enthusing about how awesome bats are, and eating cookies.
Alix E Harrow
Episode 115 : Alix E. Harrow on Doors, Portals, and Going on Adventures
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A former academic and adjunct, Alix E. Harrow is now a full-time writer living in Kentucky with her husband and their semi-feral toddlers. She is the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Hugo award-winning short fiction.
Tj Klune
Episode 128: TJ Klune Introduces Us to the Disaster Twink
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TJ KLUNE is a USA Today bestselling, Lambda Literary Award-winning author and an ex-claims examiner for an insurance company. His novels include The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries. Being queer himself, TJ believes it’s important—now more than ever—to have accurate, positive, queer representation in stories.
Visit Tj’s website, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram. You can also check out the Klunatics on Facebook to connect with other fans of his work.
Mary Robinette Kowal
Episode 91: Mary Robinette Kowal on Diverse and Intersectional Characters, and Much, Much More
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Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Glamourist Histories series, Ghost Talkers, and the Lady Astronaut duology. She’s a member of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Mary Robinette, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), recording fiction for authors including Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She lives in Nashville with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters.
Visit Mary Robinette at her website, or check out her Twitter.
Naomi Kritzer
Episode 114: Naomi Kritzer on Cats, Personhood, & Catfishing on CatNet
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Naomi Kritzer makes pie crusts from scratch. And excellent pie. Kritzer is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota who has been writing science fiction and fantasy for twenty years. The short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards and was nominated for the Nebula Award, and the book Catfishing on CatNet came out on November 19th, 2019 from Tor Teen.
Makiia Lucier
Episode 93: Makiia Lucier Helps Us Map Everything
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Makiia Lucier (mah-key-ah loo-seer) grew up on the Pacific Island of Guam and holds degrees in journalism and library studies from the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her debut novel, A Death-Struck Year, about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, was called a “powerful and disturbing reading experience” by Publishers Weekly. Her second novel, Isle of Blood and Stone, was named a Best Fiction for Young Adults pick by the American Library Association.
The world of St. John del Mar, in which Isle of Blood and Stone and Song of the Abyss take place, was inspired by a childhood love of the Indiana Jones movies, as well as a lifelong fascination with old, old maps.
Makiia lives with her husband and daughter in North Carolina.
You can visit Makiia on her website, or follow her on Twitter.
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Seanan McGuire
Episode 105: Seanan McGuire on Cats, Carnivals, Empathy, and … Fantasy Dildos?
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Our Lady of Halloween Seanan McGuire does ALL the things. No, we’re not exaggerating. The rumors about a clone army of Seanans rampaging around the West Coast (along with a veritable dogpile of Velociraptors) are, in fact, entirely true, and have been verified scientifically (from space!) as the result of doing ALL the things: music, musical theater, cats (not the musical, although we need clarification on that), Diet Dr. Pepper, comics and cartoons, and books in all the science fictional and fantastical and horrific genres and genre-adjacent modes under multiple names. Mira Grant seems cool, and as such Seanan got to write a novel in the Alien franchise, but we’re not sure how to talk about that just yet. (The stakes are almost too high.) Oh, and Seanan/Mira is also something of a hobbyist virologist, which, cool. And Seanan’s website is prone to Google Chrome error notices about “attackers may be trying to steal your information,” which is totally unconnected to viruses, right? With a body of work that is scarily impressive in its breadth and diversity, it’s no wonder that her Goodreads author page has projects sketched out through 2023 already, and we’re already fetching out the box of tissues for the next installment in the Wayward Children series.
Visit Seanan’s websites, as both Seanan McGuire and Mira Grant, and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Rosaria Munda
Episode 123 : Rosaria Munda Shows Us What Happens After an Empire Falls (with Dragons!)
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Rosaria Munda grew up in rural North Carolina, where she climbed trees, read Harry Potter fanfiction, and taught herself Latin. She studied political theory at Princeton and lives in Chicago with her husband and turtle. Her young adult fantasy Fireborne received four starred reviews and is a Cybils award winner.
Visit Rosaria’s website, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Episode 78: Suyi Davies Okungbowa on the Socioeconomics of the Post-Apocalypse
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Suyi Davies Okungbowa is a Nigerian author of fantasy, science fiction and general speculative fiction inspired by his West-African origins. He is the author of the highly-anticipated epic fantasy series, The Nameless Republic, forthcoming from Orbit Books in 2021. His highly acclaimed debut, the godpunk fantasy novel David Mogo, Godhunter (Abaddon, 2019), was hailed as "the subgenre's platonic deific ideal" by WIRED and nominated for the BSFA Award. His shorter fiction and nonfiction have appeared internationally in periodicals like Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Fireside, Podcastle, Ozy, and anthologies like Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Saga, 2020), A World of Horror (Dark Moon Books, 2018) and People of Colour Destroy Science Fiction (John Joseph Adams, 2017).
As a speaker and instructor, Suyi teaches college-level writing at the University of Arizona, where he is also completing his MFA in Creative Writing. He has guest lectured at public workshops at venues like the Piper Writing Centre at ASU and the Tucson Festival of Books, as well as appeared at various conferences, conventions, readings and school visits, including at the University of Washington and University of Chicago. His work has earned him appearances in the San Francisco Chronicle and SFX Magazine, interviews on NPR, as well as a Carl Brandon Scholarship. He was named one of 50 Nigerians in the YNaija 2020 New Establishment.
He currently lives between Lagos, Nigeria and Tucson, Arizona
Learn more about Suyi at his website, and follow him on Twitter or support him on Patreon.
Deji Bryce Olukotun
Episode 81 : Deji Bryce Olukotun on Dinosaurs, Advocacy, and Making Room for Others
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Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of two novels and his fiction has appeared in five different book collections. His novel After the Flare won the 2018 Philip K. Dick special citation award, and was chosen as one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Syfy.com, Tor.com, Kirkus Reviews, among others. His novel Nigerians in Space, a thriller about brain drain from Africa, was published by Unnamed Press in 2014. He is currently the Head of Social Impact at the audio technology company Sonos and a Future Tense Fellow at New America.
You can learn more about Deji on his website.
Jess E. Owen
Episode 62: Talking with Jess E. Owen
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Jess is a professional author and artist. For years she was an Equity Stage Manager in the theatre, but left that life to focus on writing. She served three years as President of the Authors of the Flathead, an organization of “writers helping writers,” and is a proud member of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.
Best known for her fantasy series starring gryfon characters, The Summer King Chronicles, Jess is currently working on a new series set in that world which she is indie publishing, as well as shopping a contemporary young adult novel to the traditional market.
She currently resides in the mountains of northwest Montana with her husband and their too-smart-for-his-own-good doggo, Sparks. Jess drinks a lot of coffee, loves music, live theatre, nature and travel and Renaissance art. She frequently speaks at local conferences and classes, striving to inspire a new generation of writers to pursue their passions. Her stories, whether fantastic or contemporary, are Noblebright at their core, woven with a spirit of determined hope, belief in the power of kindness, and the faith that good will overcome.
Visit Jess’s website, or follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and DeviantArt.
Tristan Palmgren
Episode 106 : Tristan Palmgren on First Contact (Part 1)
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Episode 107 : Tristan Palmgren on First Contact (Part 2)
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Episode 86: Tristan Palmgren on Time, Feudalism, Colonialism and Science Fantasy
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Tristan Palmgren is a currently working SF/F writer. They earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In their various lives, they've worked as a clerk, a factory technician, a university lecturer, a cashier, a secretary, a retail manager, and coroner's assistant. Palmgren’s debut novel Quietus, a genre-warping blend of historical fiction and space opera set during the Black Death, was published by Angry Robot Books March, 2018. The sequel, Terminus, was released in November, 2018. Now they are, to quote your blog, “at a difficult, recurring phase in [their] career where [they] have a lot going on, and [they are] working late on it most nights, but [...] can’t share any of it.” (Still accurate? Feel free to edit away)
Visit Tristan at their website, or follow them on Twitter.
C.L. Polk
Episode 134: Chelsea Polk (of the Kingston Cycle + Midnight Bargain)
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C. L. Polk (she/her/they/them) is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning debut novel Witchmark, the first novel of the Kingston Cycle. Ms. Polk lives near the Bow River in Calgary, Alberta, in a tiny apartment with too many books and a yarn stash that could last a decade. Her newest novel,The Midnight Bargain, is upcoming in 2020 from Erewhon Books.
Lina Rather
Episode 119: Lina Rather Gifts Us Nuns in a Giant Space Critter
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Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan, now living in Washington, D.C. Her stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cook, go hiking, and collect terrible 90s comic books
Jeremy Reimer
Episode 120: On the Making of Minds with Jeremy Reimer
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Jeremy Reimer is a science-fiction author living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He also writes about the history of obscure computers for Ars Technica. His latest novel, Silicon Minds of Mars, explores the possibilities of human-like artificial intelligence and its effect on the political landscape of a newly-colonized planet.
Visit Jeremy’s website, subscribe to his newsletter, and follow him on Twitter and Reddit.
dave ring
Episode 124: dave ring on Publishing, Editing, and the Inclusion of Queer Voices in SFF
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dave ring is a writer, counselor and dilettante living in Washington, DC. He is the chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival and an active member of the Speculative Wordsmiths. He is also the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press. He has two speculative anthologies under his belt: Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was (Mason Jar Press) and Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die (Neon Hemlock Press). He is also the editor of the forthcoming zines VOIDJUNK and A Formal Invitation.
dave was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2018 resident of Futurescapes and Disquiet, and a 2019 resident of Sundress Academy for the Arts. He has stories featured or forthcoming in more than two dozen publications, including Fireside Fiction, GlitterShip, and A Punk Rock Future.
Visit dave’s website or the website of his small press, Neon Hemlock. You can also follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Episode 87 : Kim Stanley Robinson ("There is no pocket utopia.")
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Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction. He has published nineteen novels and numerous short stories but is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. Robinson's work has been labeled by The Atlantic as "the gold-standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing.”
Stan doesn’t have his own internet presence, but you can check out what he’s been up to thanks to dedicated groups that keep track on a website, Facebook, and Twitter.
Alexandra Rowland
Episode 118 : Conspiring Truthily with Alexandra Rowland
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Alexandra Rowland is the author of A Conspiracy Of Truths, A Choir Of Lies, and Finding Faeries, as well as a cohost of the Hugo Award nominated podcast Be the Serpent, all sternly supervised by their feline quality control manager. They hold a degree in world literature, mythology, and folklore from Truman State University.
Visit Alex’s website, and follow them on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
Scott Selisker
Episode 80: What Makes Science Fiction Beautiful?
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Episode 16: The Outbreak Narrative
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Scott Selisker is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and affiliate faculty with the School of Information. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literary and cultural studies, with an emphasis in science, technology, and society. His first book, Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), deals with the ways that ideas about freedom and unfreedom have circulated between U.S. literature, film, the social sciences, and public culture since World War II. His current project deals with the ways that contemporary fiction thinks about social networks. His work on digital humanities has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Visit Scott’s faculty page at the University of Arizona, or follow him on Twitter.
Caitlin Starling
Episode 127: Saying Yes(samine) to Caitlin Starling's Yellow Jessamine
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Episode 101 : Caitlin Starling on Fear, Fungus, & Finding Intimacy in Horror
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Caitlin Starling is the author of The Luminous Dead, and served as narrative designer for the art installation A. Human. She has been paid to design body parts, and is always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.
Visit Caitlin’s website, or follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Eleanor Tremeer
Episodes coming soon!
Eleanor has spent far too many hours of her life watching Star Trek and obsessing over queer representation in scifi — and now, somehow, she’s getting paid for it. Her pieces have been featured in io9, Empire Magazine, and DigitalSpy, among others.
Kali Wallace
Episode 96: Kali Wallace on Her Brilliant Salvation Day
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Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. Her first novel for adults, the science fiction horror-thriller Salvation Day, is now available from Berkley. She is also the author of the young adult novels Shallow Graves and The Memory Trees and the middle grade fantasy City of Islands. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov's, Tor.com, and other speculative fiction magazines. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California.
Visit Kali on her website, or follow her on Instagram.