Dr. Rob Pyatt calls himself a stand-up scientist. By day, he’s a clinical scientist whose medical specialty is the use of molecular technologies to find the causes of genetic disorders. For sixteen years he served as an independent consultant on the use of genetic evidence in court cases and he has held academic positions at Ohio State University, the University of South Dakota, and Kean University. In addition to his clinical work, Rob’s also a research scientist and his projects have been featured online at Forbes and Discover Magazine. By night, Rob’s an award-winning science educator including organizing science pubs and science festivals. He’s also the co-host of the Trackside Science podcast with Dr. Jeff Mahr. Rob’s passion is his Weird Science workshops which he’s presented for audiences across the USA and the UK.

Jennifer Brozek is an award-winning author, editor, and tie-in writer. A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods, Never Let Me Sleep, and The Last Days of Salton Academy were finalists for the Bram Stoker Award. She was awarded the Scribe Award for best tie-in Young Adult novel for BattleTech: The Nellus Academy Incident and for Shadowrun: Auditions. Grants Pass won an Australian Shadows Award for best edited publication. A three-time Hugo finalist for Best Editor, Short Form and a finalist for the British Fantasy Award, Jennifer is an active member of SFWA, HWA, and IAMTW. She keeps a tight writing and editing schedule and credits her husband Jeff with being the best sounding board ever. Visit Jennifer's worlds at jenniferbrozek.com or her social media accounts on LinkTree .

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer by night. His fiction has appeared in venues including Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Reactor. His translations have been published at venues including Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, including the Best Short Story Hugo for "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" and the Best Novelette Nebula for "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You." The Subtle Art of Folding Space, his debut novel, was published by Tor in 2026.

Michael W Lucas is the author of fifty-odd books on topics ranging from Unix management to cozy mysteries. He's been a Unix user since 1987 and a sysadmin since 1995. If you ask him about how to make a living writing, BSD Unix, OpenZFS, DNS, martial arts, or pet rats he won't shut up, so consider yourself warned. He loathes the movie Laserblast so much, he wrote a spite book about it. Speaking of spite, he maintains the authoritative list of titles he's written in an SNMP table, but you can get a slightly obsolete version at mwl.io .

Phenderson Djéli Clark is the award-winning and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon nominated author of the Abeni’s Song series, the novel A Master of Djinn, and the novellas The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums, and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His stories have appeared in online venues such as Tor.com , Apex magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies including Hidden Youth and Black Boy Joy. When not writing speculative fiction, he is an academic historian whose research examines slavery and emancipation in the Black Atlantic. At present time, he resides in a small Edwardian castle in New England with his wife, twin daughters, and pet dragon (who suspiciously resembles a Boston Terrier). His next work, Abeni and the People Who Could Fly, will be released in September 2027.

Seanan McGuire, aka Mira Grant, aka A. Deborah Baker, does not sleep much, which accounts for the ridiculous amount of stuff she writes. The author of over a hundred published books across multiple names, she also writes for multiple popular media franchises, including Magic the Gathering and My Little Pony. Coincidentally enough, she also plays a lot of Magic, and probably has a Commander deck on her (low-3, constructed for chaos, no clear wincons). Seanan lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she spends her time writing, wandering into swamps, getting lost in cornfields, and playing with her ridiculously oversized cats (she has Maine Coons). She's very excited to be visiting Detroit, not least because she gets to visit an online friend's peacock farm while she's in town, and is looking forward to being covered in ridiculously oversized birds.