Staff Biographies

Charlotte Bhaskar (First Reader)
Mary Elizabeth Burroughs (Development and Articles Editor): Mary Elizabeth Burroughs, a native of Florida, is a writer, illustrator, and consultant living in Oxford, Mississippi. She earned a degree in Art and English (BA), as well as one in Creative Writing (MFA). Among other things, Mary adores graphic novels, television, antique illustrations, and spices.
Kate Cowan (Development): Kate lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and no, she doesn't mind the weather! Her favorite animal is the wombat, her favorite meal is dessert, and her favorite poet is Daphne Gottlieb. She likes lists, dystopias, and pie, and concedes that sometimes real life is stranger than fiction.
Rebecca Cross (Columns Editor)
Tahlia Day (Copy Editor): Tahlia is a freelance editor some of the time and an artist the rest of the time. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with two cats, many paintings in varying states of completion, and many books.
Donna Denn (Reviews Contact Manager - US): Donna Denn works in the books department of the area Hastings store. (It's an entertainment superstore where they sell books, movies, music and software. Also glow in the dark toilet seats, and just about any novelty item you could imagine.) She does reviews for Maggie at Compulsive Reader. She runs several reading groups at yahoogroups: Fantasy Favorites, as well as Oprah Classics. And she participates in a lot of other reading groups, or at least chatters a lot on them. Married, two cats, kids are out creating havoc on their own now. Reading is her main hobby (besides being an internet junkie). Favorite authors include (but are not limited to) George RR Martin, Robin Hobb, Stephen King, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, and several more. She lives in a little town (just outside of Stephenville on a map) called Dublin in Texas where the St Patrick's Day festival includes such fun activities as cow patty bingo and blind tractor races.
Shane Gavin (Senior Webmaster): Third person says: Shane hails from a rainy little border town in the North East of Ireland. He's a game development student (a so-called "mature" student), occasional pseudomusician, person who sometimes draws and speculative fiction writer. His passions in life are science fiction and code, not always in that order. When visiting the interwebs, he stays at nodehead.com, and sometimes visits twitter.com/nodehead
Craig Gidney (Development): Craig Laurance Gidney lives and writes in Washington, DC. (Yes, he's run into various politicos; he even has a slightly interesting anecdotes about Bill Clinton and James Carville). For more news about him, you can read his blog: http://ethereal-lad.livejournal.com.
Sharon K. Goetz (Senior Copy Editor): Too fond of textuality for her own good, Sharon K. Goetz works for a print-and-digital project that creates critical editions. She thought that finishing her Ph.D. (on medieval English chronicles and their manuscript contexts) would free up some time, but it hasn't. Sharon enjoys reading SF, playing video games, crocheting with thread, and hiking.
Susan Marie Groppi (Advisor, former Fiction Editor, and former Editor-in-Chief): Susan is a high-school history teacher, a World Fantasy Award winner, and an amateur bread-maker. She lives in Brooklyn, where she loves the city but hates the weather.
Rachel Hampton (First Reader): Rachel Hampton lives near and sometimes in New York City with her valiant, slightly demonic laptop, Dante II. She used to go to college and will again very shortly, but for now she reads and works at a café. She recently learned how to throw axes, but is not very good at it. Yet.
Michael Harris (Assistant Webmaster): Michael has finished a degree and is currently working on a second (expected to finish sometime between June 2013 and June 2014). He sometimes updates the website at http://next-nexus.info with various bits and pieces. If he grows up he wants to be a supermodel, or maybe a librarian. One or the other. He constantly day dreams stories, but has not yet managed to write any down.
Niall Harrison (Editor-in-Chief): By day, Niall is a mild-mannered medical writer; by night, an sf fan, editor, and would-be critic. He has written for Interzone, Foundation, Vector, Bookslut, and The Internet Review of Science Fiction, among others. He lives in Oxford, UK.
Dan Hartland, (Reviews Contact Manager - UK)
Miriah Hetherington (First Reader)
Brendan Hogg (Copy Editor): Brendan Hogg lives in the South West of England and is training to be a science teacher, in the vain hope of improving the scientific accuracy of the next generation of SF writers.
Catherine Krahe (First Reader)
Anaea Lay (Podcast Editor): Anaea Lay lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she sells real estate under a different name, writes, cooks, plays board games, spoils her cat, and plots to take over the world. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex, Penumbra, Lightspeed, Shock Totem, and Nightmare. She lives online at anaealay.com
Pamela Manasco (Articles Editor): Pamela is a writer and poet living in the Birmingham, Alabama area with her husband, dog, and entirely too many books.
Brit Mandelo (Fiction Editor): Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. She currently has two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling. Her work—fiction, nonfiction, poetry; she wears a lot of hats—has also been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Ideomancer. She is a Louisville native and lives there with her partner in an apartment that doesn't have room for all the books.
Clare McBride (First Reader): Clare McBride will read anything once, which she proves all the time at her book blog, The Literary Omnivore. Reared on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Legend of Zelda, she talks back to movies and remains a fervent fantasy fan to this day. A French-American military brat, she can usually be found in Atlanta, Georgia, picking through thrift stores for out-of-print editions of The Lord of the Rings and Duran Duran t-shirts.
Jennifer Melchert: Jen is a professional assistant and enthusiastic reader of sci-fi/fantasy currently living in the greater NYC area with chaos and a cat. She holds no degrees and gets excited about things that are going to end poorly. Her blog is at jenphalian.com.
Gabriel Murray: Gabriel Murray lives in Queens and owns a cat. He is a graduate of the 2007 Clarion Workshop and blogs periodically at http://orestesdrunk.wordpress.com about interactive fiction and other miscellany. It's rumored that when Guy of Lusignan spied on him in the bath, he was discovered to have a serpent's tail and promptly took to flying around Lusignan in circles complaining loudly.
David Nagdeman (Senior Articles Editor): David is a Chicagoan who is trying Fate in the Mountain West region. He tends, tragically, to live life through mismatched literary tropes. He has degrees in Religious Studies (B.A.) and Divinity (M.A.). If you ask what this means, he'll probably mumble something about theology, or the meaning of life, or Origen of Alexandria. This conversation is not likely to end well. It would be much more fruitful to engage him in a discussion about books, music, film, or well scripted television. Motifs of science fiction and historical fiction are generally favored.
Emily Natsios (Copy Editor): After many years of adventures in retail bookselling, Emily now works for a scholarly book publisher in Maryland. This is a good outlet for her red pen, as it is rather frowned on to make corrections in bookstore merchandise. She also loves fencing and hiking, which make her sound very athletic, when really, she's a big nerd and loves nothing better than curling up and burying her nose in a good book, preferably sci-fi/fantasy. She hates writing about herself in the third person.
Katherine Nehring (First Reader): Katherine Nehring lives in Brooklyn and studies in Manhattan. She writes and travels, occasionally both at the same time. Both she and her cats appreciate the fiber arts, though from very different perspectives.
Phoebe North (Articles Editor): Phoebe North has an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. She lives in New York State with her husband and her cat, who just might be the most intelligent being in her household. Her first novel, Starglass, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers in July of 2013. She can be found online at www.phoebenorth.com and www.intergalactic-academy.net.
Abigail Nussbaum (Senior Reviews Editor): Abigail Nussbaum works as a software engineer in Tel Aviv, Israel. She has written for The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Vector, and the Israeli SFF quarterly The Tenth Dimension. She blogs on matters genre and otherwise at Asking the Wrong Questions.
Adrienne J. Odasso (Poetry Editor): Adrienne's debut collection of poetry, Lost Books (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2010), was nominated for the 2010 LNPA Best New Poet Award and for the 2011 Forward Prize, and was also a finalist for the 2011 People's Book Prize. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of strange and wonderful publications, including Sybil's Garage, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, Cabinet des Fées, Midnight Echo, Not One of Us, Dreams & Nightmares, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, and Stone Telling, as well as The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross anthologies (just to name a few). Her short fiction has also appeared both online and in print. Her two chapbooks, Devil's Road Down and Wanderlust, are available from Maverick Duck Press. After residing for six years in the United Kingdom, she is currently biding time in Worcester, Massachusetts with her spouse and four lively Siamese fighting fish. You can find her online at ajodasso.livejournal.com.
An Owomoyela (Fiction Editor): An (pronounce it "On") is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov's, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year's Bests. An's interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008 and attended the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in 2011, and is in a constant state of learning and revising ser understanding of the world.
Nate Parkes (First Reader)
Vanessa Phin: A Midwestern feminist exported to Maryland and tied down at UMBC. Approximately 33 calories (all corn). Produces sons and stories in succession.
Julia Rios (Fiction Editor): Julia Rios is a writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. She promotes QUILTBAG speculative fiction with The Outer Alliance (in part by hosting the Outer Alliance Podcast), is the staff interviewer for Stone Telliing: The Magazine of Boundary-crossing Poetry, and occasionally reads stories for places like PodCastle and Pseudopod. Julia is half Mexican, but her (fairly dreadful) French is better than her Spanish. She loves cats and colorful things, and expresses the latter by dyeing her hair bright colors and messing about with papercrafts.
Rena Saimoto (Webmaster): Rena lives on the western end of a blue state so surrounded by red states it looks purple. She lives with two crazy hellhounds the rescue people claimed were Boxers, and a long-suffering partner. She hopes to one day have a job poking people and animals with needles in the name of "Research," but will also settle for poking people or animals with needles in the name of "Medical Treatment." Until that far-away day arrives, she spends her time trying to learn mutiple disparate things at the same time and collecting books she intends to read "someday real soon." Outside of school, Rena can be found working at IROSF, Ravenna Press, the local bookstore, the local Humane Society, the local botanical conservatory, the local organic CSA, the local cooking school, and the local EMS service and/or hospital, all of which she is listing not to brag, but to keep track of why she gets so sleepy in the evenings.
Will Scilacci (Copy Editor): Will is an erstwhile would-be who one day ran afoul of a trap door in the Academy's basement and just kept falling. He hopes to see the light of day again someday soon and meanwhile lives and teaches and reads in Boston, Massachusetts.
Romie Stott (Poetry Editor): Romie is a Boston-area filmmaker and closed captioner. She has worked with Reflection's Edge, Superficial Flesh, Dybbuk Press, Drollerie, the National Gallery (London), the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Her online portfolio is at romiesays.tumblr.com.
Becca Striman (First Reader)
Mithran Somasundrum (Copy Editor): Mithran grew up in London. In 1994 he moved to Bangkok, and then after four years, tiring of the pollution, shifted to Fukui, a small, quiet town in Japan. He lectures in physical chemistry, writes so far unpublished fiction, and still can't read kanji.
Stephanie Stein (Copy Editor): When not reading sci-fi or fantasy, which is sometimes, Stephanie can be found working on YA and middle-grade books at HarperCollins. She blogs at Crunchy Dragon, and enjoys video games, theater, and breakfast foods. Like a few million other people, she lives in New York.
Jessie Stickgold-Sarah (Development)
Sonya Taaffe (Senior Poetry Editor): Sonya Taaffe has a tried and tested devotion to mythology and folklore. Poems and short stories of hers have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, and Trochu divné kusy 3; a selection of her work can be found in Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books). She holds master's degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object.
Leah Thomas (First Reader): Leah Thomas currently writes fiction from her earthquake-proof den of an apartment in Taipei, the city where she also teaches English as a Second Language. When not struggling to make unruly stories and/or children behave, she spends her time drawing comics, making costumes for cosplay shenanigans, rewatching Spaced for the gazillionth time, or engaging in other, equally geeky activities. She is a graduate of the Clarion Workshop, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov's, Daily Science Fiction, Weird Fiction Review, and Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction.
Pär Winzell (Webmaster)
Leah Zander (First Reader): Leah Lee Zander was recently evicted from college on the charge of having fulfilled her graduation requirements. She is currently applying to graduate school with the hope of sneaking back into academia. Leah is a reader, writer, and rabid enthusiast of the fantastic. During high school she began a fantasy discussion group at her local library, and in the same spirit of pioneering masochism she went on to co-found Tea & Fantasy, Bennington College's first speculative literature club-cum-tea orgy. Leah has enjoyed internships at Random House and Small Beer press, and she presented an essay at ICFA 2012. You'll probably see Leah at New England genre conventions, where she is recognizable by her red hair, big glasses, and bewildered expression.

For former staff member bios, see the Staff Emeritus page.

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