Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author whose debut, The Art of Starving, which was an NPR Best of the Year; his second novel, Blackfish City, was a Best Book of the Year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more, as well as a "Must Read" in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, Miller's work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. The last in a long line of butchers, he lives in New York City and at samjmiller.com.

Amal El-Mohtar (Introduction) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. 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 Awards in the same year. El-Mohtar is the author, with Max Gladstone, of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a queer, epistolary, spy-vs-spy love story, and The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. She reviews books for NPR and is the science-fiction and fantasy columnist for the New York Times Book Review. El-Mohtar lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats.