Posted on

Ihor Mysiak

Ihor Mysiak, born June 16, 1993 in Lviv, was a contemporary Ukrainian poet and prose writer. He studied history at Drohobych Pedagogical University and actively participated in the Revolution of Dignity. From late 2014 to mid-2015, he served as a military paramedic in the Azov Brigade.

Mysiak won several literary awards in Ukraine, including Khortytsia Bells (2018), Irpin Parnassus (2018), Zhytomyr TEM (2019), and An T-R-Act (2020). His work has been featured in Literary Chernihiv, Dzvin, and various anthologies.

In March 2022, a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, he joined the Territorial Defense Forces, fighting in the liberation of Kherson and later in the intense battles near Bakhmut.

His debut novel, The Factory, was published in Ukrainian soon after, a sign of hope during the early weeks of the full-scale invasion that Ukraine would stand. Ihor’s life was cut short at the front line when he was killed by Russia in the spring of 2023.

Hanna Leliv is a freelance literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and mentee at the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program run by the UK National Center for Writing. Hanna has been collaborating with a range of Ukrainian and international publishers, and in 2023-24, she was a translator-in-residence at Princeton University.

Yevheniia Dubrova is a writer and literary translator from the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Winner of the 2024 Lando Grant for refugee writing from the de Groot Foundation, she writes about displacement, loss, memory, and what endures, and translates fiction, poetry, and plays from Ukrainian.

Posted on

Cheryl S. Ntumy

Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of short fiction and novels of speculative fiction, young adult fiction and romance. Her work has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine; Apex Magazine; World Literature Today; Best of World SF Vol. 3 and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022, among others. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship. She is part of the Sauúti Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of Petlo Literary Arts, an organization that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana.

cherylsntumy.wordpress.com

Posted on

Valya Dudycz Lupescu is a writer, poet, and editor living in Chicago. She is the author of the The Silence of Trees, a magical realism novel drawing upon Ukrainian folklore and history, as well as co-author of the nonfiction books Geek Parenting and Forking Good. The first volume of her new graphic novel trilogy, Mother Christmas, was published by Rosarium Publishing in 2022. Valya earned her M.F.A. in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been published in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Kenyon Review, Gone Lawn, Jersey Devil Press, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, and others. She is the founding editor of Conclave: A Journal of Character and co-founder of the Wyrd Words Storytelling Workshop. Valya has been making magic with food and words for more than 30 years, incorporating traditions from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth.

Olha Brylova has lived in Dnipro, Ukraine, since her early childhood and cannot imagine living in a city without a big river. She has studied Japanese language and literature at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, translated Japanese poetry into Ukrainian, and written several novels; recently, she has been writing screenplays for TV and video games. She dreams of becoming a showrunner of a big SF TV series and is sure that one day she will become one. Olha doesn’t fixate on any one particular genre — she has written fantasy, space opera, speculative fiction, and her next big thing is a detective story. She is also a huge cinephile and runs a blog about movies and TV series in partnership with her son Arseniі. She loves cats, including the one that is nibbling at her toes right now.

Iryna Pasko lives in Dnipro, Ukraine. She graduated from Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, a candidate of philological sciences majoring in Ukrainian literature. She taught at her alma mater from 2013 to 2022, and now works at the New Ukrainian School media and at the Dnipro Art Museum. Iryna has been shortlisted for the ProМинуле historical short story contest three times; and she has twice won the Starfort (Зоряна фортеця) fantastic short story contest. In 2021, Iryna was a finalist in the all-Ukrainian poetry competition Granoslov. In 2021-2022, she participated in the “Independence Agency” project, a collection of fantastic stories dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the restoration of Ukraine’s Independence; and Legendarium of the Wonder Cities (retellings of fairy tales). In 2022, Iryna wrote the online comic “Things” (“Речі”) about the experience of living the war in a relatively safe city, and she co-organized the fantasy-poetry competitions at the Аль Мор festival (2022) and the story competition #ракбоятисьне_можна (2022-2023). Before the full-scale war, Iryna collaborated with the Book Space Dnipro and Gogolfest (in Dnipro and Mariupol), as a lecturer and tour guide.

Posted on

Bogi Takács

Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish author, editor, critic and scholar who’s an immigrant to the US. Bogi has won the Lambda and Hugo awards, and has been a finalist for other awards. E edited three volumes of Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction. Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation were both released in 2019, and eir second collection Power to Yield and Other Stories is coming in late 2023.

You can find Bogi talking about books at bogireadstheworld.com, and on various social media like Twitter, Patreon and Instagram as bogiperson.

Posted on

Clara Ward

Author Clara Ward

Clara Ward lives in Silicon Valley on the border between reality and speculative fiction. When not using words to teach or tell stories, Clara uses wood, fiber, and glass to make practical or completely impractical objects.

Their short fiction has appeared in Strange HorizonsDecoded PrideThe Arcanist, and as a postcard from Thinking Ink Press.

Posted on

Brandon Crilly Copy

An Ottawa-based teacher by day, Brandon Crilly has more than thirty published short stories to date, involving things like carbon footprint taxes, a bookstore that knows what you need, and selling your soul for a love ballad. He’s a conference organizer, Twitch streamer, an award-nominated podcaster, a snake parent, and clearly needs more things to fill his time.

brandoncrilly.com
Twitter @B_Crilly

Posted on

Brandon Crilly

An Ottawa-based teacher by day, Brandon Crilly has more than thirty published short stories to date, involving things like carbon footprint taxes, a bookstore that knows what you need, and selling your soul for a love ballad. He’s a conference organizer, Twitch streamer, an award-nominated podcaster, a snake parent, and clearly needs more things to fill his time.

brandoncrilly.com
Twitter @B_Crilly

Posted on

Ava Kelly & Matthew Spencer

Ava Kelly is a nonbinary speculative writer and engineer. Secretly a pile of cats in a trenchcoat, Ava’s goal is to bring into the world more tales of friendship and compassion, dedicated to trope subversion, stories that give the void a voice. Romanian living in Norway, Ava is an avid explorer of culture and its reflection upon life and creativity, both in art and in tech design. Among their works are the award-winning novel Havesskadi, and the short story “A Sudden Displacement of Matter” part of the Lambda-nominated anthology Trans-Galactic Bike Ride: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers.

Find them at AvaKellyFiction.com or @ThunderEternal on Twitter.

Matt Spencer is a queer & trans illustrator from southeast Michigan. His work appears in The Chromatic Fates Tarot, Wyrmwood’s Corrupted Tarot, and Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness (an anthology for which he also illustrated an oracle deck). When not creating artwork for freelance clients or collaborative tarot decks, Matt spends his time playing (or drawing) Dungeons & Dragons characters, and making slow but steady progress on his own Courtly Beasts Tarot. Matt adores any excuse to combine his deep love for watercolor with the inspiration he draws from history, folklore, and nature (especially when queer characters are involved).

Find him at mspencerillustration.com or @mspencerdraws on Twitter.