Jeff VanderMeer
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer (born July 7, 1968 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania) is an American writer, editor and publisher. He is best known for his contributions to the New Weird and his stories about the city of Ambergris, in books like City of Saints and Madmen.
He was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.
His work, both books and short stories, has been translated into over twenty languages. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases may be his most famous anthology, and is considered a cult classic, still in print along with his Leviathan original fiction series.
VanderMeer's reviews and essays have appeared in The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and many others. He is a regular columnist for the Amazon book-culture blog, and has served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, among others, and has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference. His multi-media presentations and lectures on a variety of topics have been given all over the world, and he makes frequent public appearances, including teaching at the Clarion Workshop and Trinity Prep School. Recently, VanderMeer began to experiment in other media, resulting in a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church and a Play Station Europe animation of his story “A New Face in Hell” by animator Joel Veitch.
Jeff VanderMeer lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann, and three cats.
Carrie Vaughn
Carrie Vaughn is an American author who writes the urban fantasy Kitty Norville series. She has published more than 40 short stories in science fiction and fantasy magazines as well as short story anthologies and internet magazines. She is one of the authors for the Wild Cards books.
Vaughn graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Occidental College (during the course of which she also spent a year at the University of York) and later graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Her stories have received a number of honorable mention credits in The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Terry Windling, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant.
Carrie Vaughn was a 1998 graduate of the intensive 6-week Odyssey Writing Workshop, one of the top speculative fiction writing workshops in the USA. In 2009, she returned to the workshop as the special writer-in-residence.
While the Kitty Norville books are published as fantasy, they have been popular with romance readers as well. In 2005, Kitty and the Midnight Hour won Romantic Times' Reviewer's Choice Award for 'Best First Mystery'. Vaughn has said she welcomes the attention, but that it was unexpected.
“I emerged from the world of science fiction and fantasy, but I'm being promoted as a romance writer. It's kind of like Jerry Lewis becoming popular in France, I guess.”
In January 2008 Kitty and the Silver Bullet was ranked 20 on the New York Times Best Seller List (Paperback Mass-Market Fiction). In February 2009, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand reached number 13.
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.
Verne's collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, and Hugo Gernsback.
