Susana Martinez-Conde is an award-winning neuroscientist, author, and professor at the State University of New York. She is the founder and Executive Director of the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, which inspired her book "Champions of Illusion," published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

Her previous book, the international bestseller "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions," was published by Holt and won the Prisma Prize for Best Science Book of the Year. Martinez-Conde is one of the premier science communicators in the United States and has made television appearances on National Geographic Channel’s Redesign My Brain, Discovery Channel’s Head Games, The Daily Planet, PBS’s NOVA:scienceNow, StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, CBS Sunday Morning, and The World According to Jeff Goldblum. She is a frequent writer for publications such as Scientific American, New Scientist, American Scientist, Mental Floss, and How It Works.

​Her research and scientific communication activities have been featured in print in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among hundreds of media stories worldwide. She has published over a hundred academic articles in the most prestigious scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author: for novel Saint Death’s Daughter, and collection Bone Swans, Stories. Other work includes The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, and Desdemona and the Deep. Just out in April 2025: Saint Death’s Herald, second in the Saint Death Series. As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, and short fiction for podcasts like Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tales to Terrify, and Podcastle. In March 2023, she produced her collaborative sci-fi musical, Ballads from a Distant Star, at New York City’s Arts on Site. (Find her music at Bandcamp under Brimstone Rhine.) Forthcoming from Outland Entertainment is the GM-less TTRPG Negocios Infernales (“the Spanish Inquisition… INTERRUPTED by aliens!”), co-designed with her husband, writer and game-designer Carlos Hernandez. Find her website and Substack newsetter via her Linktree or try “csecooney” on various social media platforms.

Puloma Mukherjee is an immigrant writer,  mother, finance-desk-job holder based in New York City. A longtime member and organizer at BSFW, Puloma recently moderated a panel (“Death Reimagined”) for the “We Demand Stories” panel series for BSFW. Her work has appeared in NY Times Tiny Love Stories, The Revealer Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, and in an anthology of speculative fiction short stories. She is currently working on her first novel.

Dr. Joy Sanchez-Taylor is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) whose research interest is science fiction and fantasy literature by authors of color. Her first book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color (2021) examines the contributions of late twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. and Canadian science fiction authors of color to the genre. Her newest book is titled Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre (July 2025).

Chelsea Abdullah is the award-winning author of The Sandsea Trilogy, an epic fantasy series that begins with The Stardust Thief. An American-Kuwaiti writer born and raised in Kuwait, she grew up listening to stories about mysterious desert creatures and wily (only sometimes likable) heroes. Consumed by wanderlust, she has put down roots in various states. After earning her MA in English at Duquesne University, she moved to the East Coast, where she currently lives. When not immersed in her own fictional worlds, she spends her free time playing video games, doodling characters, and hoarding books she doesn’t have the shelf space for."

C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author: for novel Saint Death’s Daughter, and collection Bone Swans, Stories. Other work includes The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, and Desdemona and the Deep. Just out in April 2025: Saint Death’s Herald, second in the Saint Death Series. As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, and short fiction for podcasts like Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tales to Terrify, and Podcastle. In March 2023, she produced her collaborative sci-fi musical, Ballads from a Distant Star, at New York City’s Arts on Site. (Find her music at Bandcamp under Brimstone Rhine.) Forthcoming from Outland Entertainment is the GM-less TTRPG Negocios Infernales (“the Spanish Inquisition… INTERRUPTED by aliens!”), co-designed with her husband, writer and game-designer Carlos Hernandez. Find her website and Substack newsetter via her Linktree or try “csecooney” on various social media platforms.

Carlos Hernandez is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (Rosarium, 2016), the novel Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (Disney Hyperion, 2019), which won the 2019 Pura Belpré Award from the American Library Association, and its sequel, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe (2020).

He's also written dozens of short stories, poems, and works of drama, usually in the SFF mode, which have found homes in magazines such as Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, the New York Times Bestselling The Cursed Carnival and Other Calamities, and many others. Recently, he's written several one-shots for Marvel Comics, both in-print and in digital formats, as well as a three-story arc for them for the Strange Academy line.

Carlos earned his Ph. D. in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, from Binghamton University in 2000. He is Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches Composition, Creative Writing, Science Fiction, and other courses at BMCC. Carlos has been a Visiting Professor of English at Western Colorado University's Graduate Creative Writing Program, and more regularly teaches graduate classes at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he runs courses in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program. His academic interests have centered around game-based learning in postsecondary environments; since 2008, he has worked extensively in game writing and game design. He has served as lead writer and a game designer on the CRPG Meriwether, as a writer and designer for the installation art of Mary Miss, and as literary curator on the Apple Arcade game Dear Reader, among other video games.

​As a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and of the Board Game Designers Group of New York, he's contributed to the development of many board and card games, both educational and commercial. Most recently, he and his wife, award-winning author C. S. E. Cooney, have successfully Kickstarted their GM-less roleplaying game Negocios Infernales, which will be published by Outland Entertainment in 2025.

​BrightFlame (she/they) writes, teaches, and makes magic for bright futures. In addition to her speculative solarpunk novel *THE WORKING*, her climate fiction appears in numerous publications, most recently in *Bright Green Futures* and *Solarpunk Creatures* anthologies. In addition to BSFW, she's a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. Her globally acclaimed workshops for magical and mundane audiences boost interconnection and resilience. She co-founded the Center for Sustainable Futures at Columbia University that features her workshops and nonfiction. She lives on Lenape territory (Turtle Island/US). brightflame.com

Jamie Liu (she/they) is a writer, climate resilience planner, and Sunrise Movement volunteer. She was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, California, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her short story "To Labor for the Hive" won Grist's third Imagine 2200 contest and is published in Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future.

Miranda Nayyar has worked in the climate change profession for almost a decade, first across sustainability non-profits including CDP and the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and now as a Senior Manager in the Climate Change practice at EY, where she advises some of the largest corporations in the world on reducing emissions and shifting business models in support of a 1.5C future. She is also a board member of Earth Hacks, an organization dedicated to environmental hackathons. 

Miranda is a member of Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers group where she’s just completed her first novel based in a fantastical and nature-filled world about a girl’s journey exploring the Wilds. 

As a stubborn optimist, Miranda believes that while it’s critical to understand the stakes of inaction on climate, she also believes it’s just as important to collectively imagine a positive, hopeful future of human populations flourishing within the confines of planetary boundaries. 

Artificial Intelligence, a staple of speculative fiction, is here, and we're all playing catch up. Most of us have a gestalt conception, a feeling of what we don't want from AI. But beyond that, we demand stories that better define the right place for AI in our society, be it governance, economy, ecology, or the arts. We demand human centered A.I.

Hilary Mason is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door, a game technology studio creating a platform for fans of books, movies, and TV shows to play together in their favorite fictional worlds. Prior to Hidden Door, Hilary was General Manager of the Machine Learning business unit at Cloudera. She previously founded Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research and consulting startup which Cloudera acquired in 2017. Additionally, she was Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, co-founded HackNY, and was Chief Scientist at bitly. Hilary has received numerous awards, is a regular keynote speaker, and has advised startups, corporations, and governments.

Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominated author and coder. His many works of short fiction have appeared in Analog, Asimov's, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Tor.com/Reactor, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other publications and anthologies, including multiple Year's Bests. Eighteen of his stories are included in his debut collection, Histories Within Us, now out from Senses Five Press. His far-future novel Space Trucker Jess is coming in 2025 from Fairwood Press. And his Mars-based novella The Rainseekers is forthcoming from Tordotcom in early 2026. Alongside Ellen Datlow, he runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan. And he is the creator of the Moksha submissions system, used by many of the largest fiction publishers today.

Holden Lee is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins focusing on mathematical foundations of AI, as well as a speculative fiction writer working on a novel about a half-mermaid's search for belonging. He co-organized the 2024 Workshop on Creativity & Generative AI in Vancouver to foster dialogue between machine learning researchers and creative professionals.