Giving the Devil His Due

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of 25 or 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. Nisi Shawl is an African-American writer, editor, and journalist. Best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories who writes and teaches about how fantastic fiction might reflect real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, colonialism, physical ability, age, and other factors. Kenesha Williams is an author, screenwriter, speaker, and Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Black Girl Magic Lit Mag, a speculative fiction literary magazine. As an, essayist she has written for Time Magazine, Motto, and Fireside Fiction. She is also a screenwriter currently in pre-production on a horror web series and a short film. Kenesha has been a panelist and speaker at StokerCon, the Horror Writers of America convention; Boskone, ECBACC, the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention; the 2017 African Americans Expo, and MECCACon. In 2012, she started at Ace/Roc under the Berkley imprint at Penguin, where she fell in love with editing amazing books. Her list included authors such as Guy Gavriel Kay, Emma Newman, Christina Henry, S.M. Stirling, John Varley, Genevieve Cogman, and Zen Cho, among many others. Her editing philosophy is to help the author make their book the best it can be, while remaining true to their voice and vision. As an editor, she becomes the author's "first" reader and fan, which can sometimes include writing comments such as, "LOL", "Oh no," and "[Insert reader crying here]." Linda D. Addison is an American poet and writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Addison is the first African-American winner of the Bram Stoker Award, which she won five times. Kelley Armstrong believes experience is the best teacher, though she's been told this shouldn't apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery, and fencing. She sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out. She is, however, an expert coffee drinker and a true connoisseur of chocolate-chip cookies.