Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author, editor, and critic. Her short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron" won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards and was a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Aurora, and Eugie Foster Awards. She is the author of the novel The River has Roots, and The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and The New York Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared on Tor and Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. She is presently pursuing a PhD at Carleton University and teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. She can be found online at @Tithenai.

Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated The Craft Sequence series, which Patrick Rothfuss called "stupefyingly good." Max's interactive mobile game Choice of the Deathless was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared on Tor and in Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. John Crowley described Max as "a true star of 21st-century fantasy." Max has sung in Carnegie Hall and was once thrown from a horse in Mongolia.