Shane Halbach lives in Chicago with his wife and two kids, where he writes software by day and avoids writing stories by night. His fiction has appeared on Escape Pod, Redstone SF, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He blogs regularly at shanehalbach.com.

“Copy Machine” will also be included in FFO alumni (“The Land of Phantom Limbs”) Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s 2014 Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. A visual artist will use “Copy Machine” as inspiration for a work of visual art, while Shane Halbach will write a flash fiction based on a separate work of visual art. Twenty-six total artists and writers will also participate. For more information, including submissions guidelines for next year’s show, visit www.bonniejostufflebeam.com/art-words-show/.

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com

Fatima Taqvi is a speculative fiction writer from Pakistan, now living in London. She has stories appearing in Strange Horizons and Fusion Fragment. She loves Indo-Persianate history and lore, and holds a firm belief that her home region’s monsters, magical beings and legendary creatures will eventually come out from the margins and into their own in speculative fiction.

Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American. She was born in a middle-class family in India and is indebted to her parents for educating her beyond their means. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee; her work has been published in Fictive Dream, Spelk Fiction, PidgeonHoles, MoonPark Review, and other journals. Her website is saraspunyfingers.com. She can be reached on Twitter @PunyFingers.

A M Hardy moved to the U.S. from Sweden as a free-roaming tween and has since lived on three different continents and in nine different states. She has worked in sales, horticulture, ecotourism, marketing, and the restaurant industry, and once held a job that required her to chase off bears by banging pots and pans. In the course of her travels, she has gotten lost on a glacier, stirred a bucket of blood with a birch branch at a reindeer roundup, and spent a night sleeping next to a lava lake. Always happiest outside, she frequently gets story ideas while on the trail, leading to much frantic scribbling around the campfire. Her stories are inspired by mythology and the magic of the natural world.