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.
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.
