Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. Currently, she is the 2024 Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence and an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website. 

Hazel Millar is the co-owner and co-publisher of Book*hug Press, a Canadian independent literary publisher working at the forefront of contemporary book culture. Hazel has been working in the publishing since 2009. In addition to her work with Book*hug Press, she is the Past Chair of the Board of the Literary Press Group of Canada and sits on several publishing-industry boards and advisory committees. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Jay Millar (aka the other half of Book*hug Press), their sons, and a cool, diva calico cat named Tess.

Dr. Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Dr. Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Alameda, CA. He is the author of Don't Leave Me This Way (Nightboat Books, 2023), Minor Work (MO0ON/IO, 2021), and Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016). With Lauren Levin, he co-edited the selected fictions of Camille Roy, Honey Mine (Nightboat Books, 2021). He received his PhD in Creative-Critical Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2022, and his essays, reviews, and interviews have been published by Jacket2, SF MoMA's Open Space, Poetry Foundation, and Social Text Online. With Daniel Benjamin he organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today and edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture. He has worked with a number of small presses in the San Francisco Bay Area; new titles are forthcoming from his and Noah Ross's press, SPUNK Editions.

Amanda Crocker is Managing Editor of Between the Lines, a social movement press founded in 1977. BTL authors are academics, journalists, artists, and activists who hope their books will spark political and social change. 

As a publishing house, BTL embodies cooperative and democratic ideals: BTL has no boss, no individual owner; it is run by a small staff collective and a dedicated volunteer editorial committee. The press publishes books not to seek profit, but to document and promote struggles for a better world, challenge the mainstream, and offer readers new perspectives on critical political issues.

Taras Grescoe, the author of eight non-fiction books (among them the best-selling Bottomfeeder, Shanghai Grand, Straphanger, and The Devil’s Picnic), has been a professional, full-time freelance journalist in Canada for the last thirty years. His works of book-length reportage and creative non-fiction, which have been published in Toronto, New York, and London and translated into half a dozen languages, have received international critical acclaim. His books have won major awards internationally and in Canada (the Mavis Gallant Prize, the Edna Staebler Prize, the Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction) and been finalists for prestigious non-fiction prizes (the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing). His features have appeared in The Walrus, Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail, L’actualité, Canadian Geographic, Maclean’s, The National Post and The Ottawa Citizen, and been published around the world in The New Yorker, Gourmet, Travel + Leisure, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Afar, Food & Wine, The Wall Street Journal, The Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Times of London and more.

Shane Hawk, a member of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is a history teacher by day and a horror writer by night. Hawk’s literary contributions include his debut story collection, Anoka, as well as short fiction featured in numerous anthologies. He co-edited the Bram Stoker, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthology Never Whistle at Night, which reached its tenth printing just one month after publication. He has co-written an Indigenous Horror stage play with Andrea L. Rogers, titled The Land Has Spoken, set to premiere in October 2024 and tour the country the following year. Hawk resides in San Diego, California with his beautiful wife and daughter.