Andrea Hairston ran away from the physics lab to the theatre when she was a young thing and has been a scientist, artiste, and hoodoo conjurer ever since. She is a novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, and L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor Emerita of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College. She is an Afrofuturist in league with Indigenous Futurists. Stories that have been erased, stolen, or hidden call to her. Writing speculative fiction, she lets African and Indigenous ancestors talk to the future.

Novels: The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays (NEW RELEASE); Mindscape, reissued by Tor/Macmillan, a Carl Brandon Award winner and finalist for the Phillip K. Dick and Otherwise Awards; Archangels of Funk, shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction; Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, a Washington Post Best Book of 2022, Otherwise and Carl Brandon Award winner; Master of Poisons on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Short fiction appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future; New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; Trouble the Waters; and Lightspeed Magazine. Plays and essays appear in Lonely Stardust. Andrea bikes at night year-round, meeting bears, multi-legged creatures of light and breath, and the occasional shooting star.

Micaiah Johnson is a Brooklyn-based author and scholar. She received her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her MFA in fiction from Rutgers-Camden. She received her doctorate at Vanderbilt university. On her mother’s side, she is a first-generation traditional high school graduate.

Her debut novel The Space Between Worlds won the Compton Crook Award and was an Editors’ Choice at The New York Times. Both her debut and its follow-up, Those Beyond the Wall, were named among NPR’s best books of the year, with The Space Between Worlds named one of the best science fiction books of the last decade.

In her academic work she is concerned with questions at the intersection of race and technology, particularly as revealed in 19th Century America, a time punctuated by spectacular shifts in both. She also works on the necropolitical implications of preservation and race, both in centuries past and in our present moment of the Sixth Great Extinction.

Cameron Roberson, who writes under the pen name Rob Cameron, is a New York City public school teacher, linguist, and writer. He is also lead organizer for the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers and founder of Constellations Mentorship for the Octavia Project. He is a workshop leader at the National Council for Teachers of English Annual Conference. His poetry, stories, and essays can be found in, among other places, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Foreign Policy Magazine, Clockwork Phoenix Five, FIYAH. Daydreamer, his debut middle grade novel, was a finalist for the Andre Norton, the Nebula award for middle grade and YA.

For his solarpunk work, he has been a guest author at the Dartmouth College Speculative Fiction Project and guest lecturer at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. His essays about solarpunk can be found on Reactor, Solarpunk Magazine, and Apex. His short story "Shape the Future from Darkness: A Solarpunk Noir" is forthcoming in Shards of Gothem: New York City Through the Looking Glass from Rudan Press. His novelette"Ice Like Honey" is forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine, and in the MIT Press anthology The Android in the Archives: Research, Design, and Our Speculative Futures.