Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden spent a year of high school in Rennes, France. Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrollment for a year in order to live and study in Moscow. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature. After receiving her B.A., she moved to Maui, Hawaii, working every kind of odd job imaginable, from grant writing and making crêpes to guiding horse trips. Currently she lives in Vermont, but really, you never know.
Callie Bates is a writer, harpist and certified harp therapist, sometime artist, and nature nerd. When she’s not writing, she’s hitting the trails or streets and exploring new places. She lives in the Upper Midwest. The Waking Land is her debut fantasy novel.
Terry Brooks has thrilled readers for decades with his powers of imagination and storytelling. He is the author of more than thirty books, most of which have been New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest.
Vic James is the author of Gilded Cage, an early draft of which won a major online award from Wattpad for most-talked-about fantasy, and Tarnished City. A current-affairs TV director who loves stories in all their forms, she has covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Britain’s EU referendum for BBC1 and has twice judged The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. She has lived in Rome and Tokyo, and currently lives in London.
Rob Reid founded Listen.com, which built the pioneering online music service Rhapsody, and created the unlimited subscription model since adopted by Apple, Spotify, and many others. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Year Zero, a work of fiction; After On, a satire of Silicon Valley; Year One, a memoir about student life at Harvard Business School; and Architects of the Web, the first true business history of the Internet. He lives in New York City with his wife, Morgan, and Ashby the Dog.