Scott Oden is a bestselling author of historical fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. Since his debut in 2005, his books have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist; he has been an Amazon Editor’s Pick and has been nominated for a Gemmell Award. His work has been endorsed by such preeminent authors as Steven Pressfield, David Anthony Durham, and John Gwynne.

Scott lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with his lovely wife, Shannon, and a variety of dogs -- all of them neurotic and prone to dancing like no one’s watching.

Before turning his hand to writing, Scott worked the usual slate of odd jobs, from delivering pizza to stocking shelves at a local grocery. In his spare time, he likes table-top roleplaying games, reading, and making the occasional bracelet from old stone beads. He dreams of running away from reality and living in a Hobbit hole . . .

If you want to know more, please visit Scott’s website at https://scottoden.wordpress.com/, where you can follow his blog and be there when he finally takes the plunge and creates a mailing list.

Milton Davis is an award winning Black Speculative fiction author and owner of MVmedia, LLC, a publishing company specializing in Science Fiction and Fantasy based on African/African Diaspora history, culture, and traditions. Milton is the author of twenty-six novels and short story collections and editor/coeditor of eleven anthologies. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and magazines, most notably Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora and Tales from the Magician’s Skull. Milton’s story ‘The Swarm’ was nominated for the 2017 British Science Fiction Association Award for Short Fiction and his story, Carnival, was nominated for the 2020 British Science Fiction Association Award for Short Fiction. He is a recipient of the 2022 East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention Pioneer Lifetime Achievement Award.

The work of Angeline Hawkes spans many decades and genres. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and has been a professional, published writer since 1981.

A crafted reporter on cultural extremes in music and art, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author Chad Hensley saw several years of his writing on underground subjects as EsoTerra: The Journal of Extreme Culture, through Creation Books in 2011 and a French-language version in 2014 through Camion Noir.

In May of 2014, Raw Dog Screaming Press published his poetry book Embrace the Hideous Immaculate.

Hensley's work has appeared in such praised publications as Rue Morgue, Weirdbook, Spectral Realms published by Hippocampus Press, Terrorizer, Spin, Hustler, Juxtapoz, and Super7 Magazine (where he was also contributing editor) as well as the books Apocalypse Culture 2, The Darker Side: Generations of Horror, The Fenris Wolf 8, and Weird Fiction Review #7, #8, #9, #10, and #11.

Both his fiction and poetry have received honorable mentions in various volumes of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. His poetry has been nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award and his poetry collection What the Cacodaemon Whispered was a Finalist for the 2001 Bram Stoker Award.

Jeffrey Shanks is an archaeologist and cultural historian specializing in early 20th century popular culture and speculative fiction. He is the co-editor of The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales, which was nominated for a 2016 Bram Stoker Award. He is also a managing editor of Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy. He currently serves as co-chair of Pulp Studies for the Popular Culture Association and he has published a number of popular and academic articles on comics history and on pulp writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard. He has received five Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards for his scholarship on Howard.

Mark Finn is an author, actor, essayist, and pop culture critic. He is a nationally-recognized authority on the Texas author Robert E. Howard and has written extensively about him. His biography, Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, was nominated for a World Fantasy award in 2007 and is currently available in an updated and expanded second edition.

His articles, essays, reviews, short stories and comics have been published by Playboy.com, RevolutionSF.com, Dark Horse Comics, DC/Vertigo Comics, Monkeybrain Books, The University of Texas press, Greenwood Press, Scarecrow Press, F.A.C.T. Publications, Tachyon Press and others.

For the past several years, Finn was named one of the top movie critics in Texas by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors awards. Currently he is a managing editor for Skelos Press and a writer-at-large for Cloak and Dagger Productions. He also blogs with The Gentlemen Nerds.

He lives in North Texas, over an old movie theater with too many books and an affable pit bull named Sonya.

Ashley began writing at the age of 12. Upon discovering the macabre work of Edgar Allan Poe, she took a borderline obsessive interest in writing horror and dark fantasy poetry and even a few fantasy novels. Her favorite authors of horror and fantasy at that time were Stephen King, Dean Koontz, J.R.R. Tolkien, Piers Anthony, and Brian Jacques who also influenced her work.

She wrote up until her senior year of high school and then took a break before starting up again after college in 2011. With a nudge from a new friend, she discovered a new kind of horror, dark fantasy, and weird work from authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, George Sterling, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and David Park Barnitz.

With this new treasure trove of horror and weird authors, she began to broaden her writing.

Aside from writing, her other passion is martial arts. When she was 12 she started practicing a shotokan Japanese karate mix (called 'American' karate) and Judo at Red Dragon until she reached 3rd class brown belt at 15. At 18 she started practicing Soo Bahk Do, a Korean karate, where she stayed for four years, getting her black belt and taught as an instructor for a brief period of time before leaving.