Steve Oden
Steve Oden has worked in the publishing industry–mainly newspapers and magazines–for more than 30 years. Although retired, he provides editorial services on a consulting basis, mainly to corporate clients, and writes on assignment. His newspaper columns have appeared regularly in Tennessee and Alabama publications since 1980, winning awards from the Alabama Press Association, University of Tennessee-Tennessee Press Association, Society of Professional Journalists, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and several wildlife conservation organizations.
Liviu Surugiu
Liviu Surugiu is a writer from outside the English-speaking world. He is editor for the foreign stories in the Romanian magazine CSF Magazine. Among his recent achievements, his prose was selected by The Lunar Codex project in NASA's Artemis program to be taken to the Polaris time capsule that will be buried by the Astrobotic Griffin / VIPER rover on the Moon next year. On the Earth, his fiction has appeared in Galaxy’s Edge by Mike Resnick (US), Cirsova Magazine (US), Vigyan Katha (India), Galaktika (Hungary), Unfit Magazine (US), Orion’s Belt Magazine (US), Gravity City (US), Supersonic (Spain), Nova Sci Fi Magazine (Germany), Teoria Omicron (Ecuador), Maquina Combinatoria (Peru), Algernon Magazine (Estonia), Short Edition (France), and, of course, in the most important magazines and anthologies in Romania. He received six Honorable Mention and two Silver HM from Writers of the Future. As a Romanian science fiction author, he won forty-one different awards over a thirty years career. Other awards he has received include: Second Place in the HBO Screenwriter's Contest (2013), Best Novel of the Year 2015, Best Novel of the Year 2016, Best Short Story Collection 2016, Best Short Story of 2017, Best Story 2020, Best Short Story Collection 2022. He also published eight books in Romania over the past eight years.
Steven Van Patten
Steven Van Patten is from Fort Greene, Brooklyn. After graduating from Long Island University on a full-tuition scholarship, he pursued a career in television production. After paying his dues, Steven went on to stage manage a plethora of TV shows, most recently The Mel Robbins Show and The View, all the while dreaming up his macabre tales. The storyline of his first novel was born from watching horror movies as a child and noticing a lack of diversity, and character development when people of color were employed. After pouring over historical research night after night, and traveling alone to various locales, including Senegal, West Africa and Osaka, Japan, he wrote the first three installments of the Brookwater’s Curse horror novel series, which featured a 1860s Georgia plantation slave who becomes a vampire. After receiving much praise, several glowing reviews from various book club heavy hitters, and literary awards for each book, Steven was admitted into the Horror Writer’s Association. His next two novels, ‘Killer Genius: She Kills Because She Cares’ and ‘Killer Genius 2: Attack of The Gym Rats’—pitted a hyper-intelligent, socially conscious female serial killer against a well-intentioned African-American detective. It debuted at NYC Comic Con in October of 2015 and was nominated for an African-American Literary Show Award for Best Mystery/ Suspense in 2016. Three years later, ‘Hell At The Way Station’, Steven’s collaboration with Marc Abbott, a horror anthology with a sort of Arabian Knights twist, won Best Anthology and Best In Sci-Free. Visit Steven at his website: https://brookwaterscurse.com
Daniel Arthur Smith
Daniel Arthur Smith is a USA Today bestselling author. His titles include Spectral Shift, Hugh Howey Lives, The Cathari Treasure, The Somali Deception, and a few other novels and short stories. He also curates the phenomenal short fiction series Tales from the Canyons of the Damned and Frontiers of Speculative Fiction. He was raised in Michigan and graduated from Western Michigan University where he studied philosophy, with focus on cognitive science, meta-physics, and comparative religion. He began his career as a bartender, barista, poetry house proprietor, teacher, and then became a technologist and futurist for the Fortune 100 across the Americas and Europe. Daniel has traveled to over 300 cities in 22 countries, residing in Los Angeles, Kalamazoo, Prague, Crete, and now writes in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and young sons.