Sarah Pinsker
Sarah Pinsker is the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and Philip K Dick Award winning author of “A Song For A New Day,” “We Are Satellites,” “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea,” “Lost Places,” “Haunt Sweet Home,” and over 60 works of short fiction. She is also a singer/songwriter with four albums on various independent labels, and teaches advanced fiction workshops at Goucher College. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and two weird dogs.
Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is a New York Times bestselling novelist and screenwriter who owns too many paperbacks and not enough shelves. He’s the author of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, and many more, including Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties that won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction. His books have sold over two million copies and been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City and will die there, too, probably crushed to death beneath piles of those paperbacks.
Erin Roberts
Erin Roberts tells stories across formats. Her short stories and interactive fiction have appeared in venues including Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, The Dark, and Strange Horizons; she’s given characters a voice in scripts for projects including Forge Your Quest and Zombies Run; and she’s written for more than 40 tabletop roleplaying game projects, including Nebula finalist Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Along the way, she’s proud to have been named a Diana Jones Emerging Game Designer, attended the Hedgebrook and Storyknife writing residencies, and served as Toastmaster of the 2025 Nebula Awards, among other honors. When not writing, she enjoys talking about the craft, and is one of the co-hosts of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses.
Abbey Mei Otis
Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller and a firestarter, raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. Her story collection, “Alien Virus Love Disaster” (Small Beer Press) was named one of the best science fiction books of the year by the Washington Post, and was a finalist for the 2018 Philip K Dick Award. She has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Tin House, Millay Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the McKnight Foundation, among others. She studied creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers, Oberlin College, and the Clarion West Writers Workshop (2010). Currently she is making a living as an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in West Philly, where her favorite days are spent walking her dogs in the woods, overstaying her welcome in coffee shops, chipping away at the novel, and dismantling the state.
Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan has three World Fantasy Awards, a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Science Fiction Research Association’s Mary Kay Bray Award for criticism. Recent stories include “Criswell Predicts!” in Julie C. Day’s “Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology,” and “The Hodges Meteorite” in “The Sunday Morning Transport,” while “A Murder House” is upcoming in Jonathan Strahan’s “The Book of the Dead.” Recent essays include a Pushcart nominee, “Role-Playing at Poe,” in Amy Branam Armiento’s “More Than Love: The Enduring Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe,” and a World Fantasy finalist, “It Is Always Time To Talk About These Things,” in the “Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.” A Clarion West alum, he has taught CW three times, Clarion four, and the SFF Masterclass in London once, and will be Guest of Honor at Confluence 2026 in Pittsburgh. An occasional stage actor, he performs a lot of readings, including nine stories on the audiobook of his collection An Agent of Utopia. He’s a writing professor at Frostburg State University, home of his Weird Western Maryland project.
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand is the author of numerous multi-award winning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Since 1987, her book reviews and criticism have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, New York Times, and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, among others. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London. Her 21st novel, “Unspeakable Things,” will be published in 2026 by Mullholland Books.
Jac Jemc (Faculty Director)
Jac Jemc teaches creative writing at UC San Diego. Her story collection False Bingo won the Chicago Review of Books Award for fiction, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Speculative Fiction, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her novel Empty Theatre was published in February 2023 by MCD x FSG. Her novel The Grip of It was released from FSG Originals in August 2017, receiving starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal, and recommended in Entertainment Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Esquire, W, and Nylon. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming from Guernica, LA Review of Books, Crazyhorse, The Southwest Review, Paper Darts, Puerto Del Sol, and Storyquarterly, among others. Jemc is also the author of My Only Wife (Dzanc Books), named a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award; A Different Bed Every Time (Dzanc Books), named one of Amazon’s Best Story Collections of 2014; and a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She’d Invited In (Greying Ghost Press). Jac received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has completed residencies at the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Hald: The Danish Center for Writers and Translators, Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, Thicket, and VCCA.