The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (35 page)

Juliet E McKenna's
love of fantasy, myth, and history led naturally to studying classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. After a career change from personnel management to combine motherhood with book-selling, her debut novel,
The Thief's Gamble,
was published in 1999. She has written a dozen epic fantasy novels, most recently The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, plus assorted shorter fiction including stories for
Doctor Who
and
Torchwood
. She reviews for web and print magazines and fits all this around her husband and teenage sons. Living in West Oxfordshire, she's currently working on a new fantasy trilogy called The Hadrumal Crisis.

Shannon Page
was born on Halloween night and spent her early years on a commune in northern California's backwoods. A childhood without television gave her a great love of books and the worlds she found in them. She wrote her first book, an adventure story starring her cat, at the age of seven. Sadly, that tale is currently out of print, but her work has appeared in
Clarkesworld
,
Interzone,
and
Fantasy
(with Jay Lake),
Black Static
,
Tor.com
, and a number of anthologies, including
Love and Rockets
from DAW and the Australian Shadows Award-winning
Grants Pass
. Shannon is a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, has no tattoos, and lives in Portland,
Oregon, with seventeen orchids and an awful lot of books. Visit her at
www.shannonpage.net
.

Avery Shade
is an author of paranormal and urban fantasy of both the adult and young adult variety. Like Autumn, she has a true love of all things green … too bad she has a black thumb. She'd like to blame it on the cold, bleak upstate NY winters she endured during both her childhood and young adult life, but even since moving to sunny North Carolina her plants haven't fared much better. Nowadays she is contentedly living her life vicariously through her stories where anything and everything is possible … even live plants.

Kristine Smith
has spent almost her entire working career in manufacturing/R&D of one kind or another, and has worked for the same northern Illinois pharmaceutical company for almost 25 years. She is the winner of the 2001 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and is the author of the Jani Kilian SF series as well as a number of short stories. She is currently working on several projects, and wishes she possessed a time-turner.

Kari Sperring
has never had a close encounter with any of the fae, although she's been accused of being away with them many times. Rumors that her writing is obsessed with water refuse to go away: her only excuse is that she comes from a family of dowsers. Her first novel, the mildly water-laden
Living With Ghosts
, came out in 2009 from DAW; the second,
The Grass King's Concubine,
contains ferrets, elemental warriors, and a water-stealing clock and is due in 2012. She's British and lives
in Cambridge, but hasn't seen the local fae drown any academics to date.

April Steenburgh
is a bookstore manager turned librarian who enjoys fire spinning and hunting for dilapidated, forgotten buildings and exploring them with a camera. When not traipsing about the countryside, she can be found around town hunting sweet potato fries or coffee with her partner in writing crimes most creative. She lives with two cats (Phaedrus and Mildmay), three ferrets (Molly, Oliver, and Alexander) and one primordial turtle named Eris. And her partner, who is wonderfully tolerant of the whole operation.

Anton Strout
is the author of the Simon Canderous urban fantasy series and
Alchemystic
, book one of the Spellmason Chronicles. He is also the author of over half a dozen tales for DAW Books. Anton was born in the Berkshire Hills mere miles from writing heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and currently lives in the haunted corn maze that is New Jersey (where nothing paranormal ever really happens, he assures you). In his scant spare time, he is a writer, a sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer, and the world's most casual and controller smashing video gamer. He can often be found lurking the darkened halls of
www.antonstrout.com
.

Jean Marie Ward
writes fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between. Her first novel,
With Nine You Get Vanyr
(written with the late Teri Smith), finaled in two categories of the 2008 Indie Book Awards. Her short stories appear in numerous anthologies. She is also
known for her art books, such as the popular
Fantasy Art Templates
. She edited the web magazine
Crescent Blues
for eight years and now writes for other online venues, including Buzzy Multimedia. Her web site is
www.JeanMarieWard.com
.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Patricia Bray
is the author of a dozen novels, including
Devlin's Luck,
which won the 2003 Compton Crook award for the best first novel in the field of science fiction or fantasy. This is her second editorial tour of duty, having previously co-edited
After Hours: Tales From The Ur-bar
(DAW, March 2011) with her partner-in-crime Joshua Palmatier. She currently lives in upstate New York, where she combines her writing with a full-time career as systems analyst, ensuring that she is never more than a few feet away from a keyboard. To find out more, visit her website at
www.patriciabray.com
.

Joshua Palmatier
is a writer with a Ph.D in mathematics. He currently resides in upstate New York while teaching mathematics at SUNY College at Oneonta. His novels include the Throne of Amenkor trilogy and, written as Benjamin Tate,
Well of Sorrows
and
Leaves of Flame
. His short story “Mastihooba” appears in
Close Encounters of the Urban Kind
and “Tears of Blood” is in
Beauty Has Her Way
. He has previously edited
After Hours: Tales From the Ur-bar
with Patricia Bray, which includes his story “An Alewife In Kish.” Find out more at
www.joshuapalmatier.com
and
www.benjamintate.com
.