Staff Biographies

Genevieve Aoki (First Reader)
Charlotte Bhaskar (First Reader)
Ian Birnbaum (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.
S. J. Chambers (Senior Articles Editor)
S. J. Chambers's nonfiction has appeared in Bookslut, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Fantasy, and The Baltimore Sun's Read Street blog. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in New Myths, Yankee Pot Roast, The Hiss Quarterly, and Mungbeing magazines. Her first book, The Steampunk Bible, co-authored with Jeff VanderMeer, will be out from Abrams Images in May, 2011. She loves receiving visitors at www.sjchambers.org.
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)
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 (Assistant Webmaster)
Shane hails from a rainy little border town in the North East of Ireland. He's an avid science fiction reader who grew up on glutinous helpings of Clarke, Asimov, Pohl and Niven, among nowhere-near-enough others. He's a Linux enthusiast who doesn't necessarily hate Windows, an Irishman who doesn't drink and a know-it-all who doesn't mind admitting when he's wrong. He's also a so-called "mature" student and an aspiring speculative fiction writer.
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.
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.
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)
Jed Hartman (Senior Fiction Editor)
Jed is a technical writer, generalist, and dilettante living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a graduate of Clarion West. When he had spare time, he used to have an eclectic set of interests, including fiction, movies, juggling, linguistics, theatre, 3D graphics, folk music, wordplay, games, technology, and listmaking. These days his activities mostly involve reading submitted stories.
Sharon K. Goetz (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.
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.
Lucas Johnson (First Reader)
Rahul Kanakia (First Reader)
Erin Keane (Poetry Editor)
Keane is the author of two collections of poetry, Death-Defying Acts (WordFarm, 2010) and The Gravity Soundtrack, (WordFarm, 2007). She is the theater critic for Louisville, Kentucky's daily newspaper, The Courier-Journal, and a graduate of Spalding University's MFA in creative writing program. She teaches in National University's MFA program and at Bellarmine University in Louisville, where she lives in a creaky Victorian house across the street from an historic cemetery with her partner Drew and her cat, Harold Bloom. Her complete bio can be found at http://sensilla.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.
Jonathan McCalmont (Articles Editor)
Jonathan McCalmont is a critic whose work has been published at The SF Site, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Vector and The Escapist as well as Strange Horizons. He maintains a film and literary blog entitled Ruthless Culture and he writes a monthly gaming column at Futurismic entitled Blasphemous Geometries.
Heather Morris (First Reader)
Drew Morse (Poetry Editor)
Drew Morse is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Oregon. A former professor of English Literature and the past editor of The Rhysling Anthology from 2003-2009, he is now a bookseller, firefighter, independent scholar, photographer, and a father.
David Nagdeman (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.
Phoebe North (Articles Editor)
Phoebe North lives outside of Washington D.C., where she writes science fiction for teenagers. She has an MFA from the University of Florida, and blogs regularly at www.phoebenorth.com. Though she doesn't believe in such things, she is nevertheless a classic Capricorn.
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.
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.
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.
Shelly Simon (Assistant Webmaster)
Shelly lives in a place that snows an excessive amount of the year. She has an eclectic assortment of interests that include, but are not limited to: typography, good tea, feminism, cryptozoology, & b-movies.
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.
Jessie Stickgold-Sarah (Development)
Sonya Taaffe (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.
JoSelle Vanderhooft (Articles Editor)

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

Top