Brian Attebery is the author of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction and many other critical works. He co-edited, with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, The Norton Book of Science Fiction. Some of Brian’s writing is online: “American Studies: A Not So Unscientific Method,” from American Quarterly 1996, “Metafictions: Stories of Reading” from Paradoxa 1998, “Exploding the Monomyth: Myth and Fantasy in a Postmodern World” from the Fantastic Fictions Symposium, Sydney Australia, 2002, and some selections from the Teacher’s Guide to the Norton Book of Science Fiction. He directs the graduate program in English at Idaho State University and moonlights as a teacher and performer on the cello. He is married to folklorist Jennifer Eastman Attebery.
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Jane Donawerth, professor of English and affiliate in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland has published books on science fiction by women, history of rhetorical theory, as well as science fiction by women. She has won seven teaching awards, and will be spending the next year on an NEH Fellowship. She is working on a critical study of history of rhetorical theory by women and an anthology of Golden Age science fiction by women in the pulps.
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L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of The Grand Conversation (2004), a collection of essays; Love’s Body, Dancing in Time (2004), a collection of short fiction; and Alanya to Alanya (2005), a novel. She has been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Homer, and Nebula awards and has been short-listed several times for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. She is also the founder and editor of Aqueduct Press, which has published Gwyneth Jones’s Philip K. Dick Award–winning novel, Life,and Nicola Griffith’s Lambda Award– nominated collection, With Her Body. An ample selection of her critical writing as well as a few of her stories can be found here.
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Andrea Hairston is the author of Mindscape (2006), a speculative novel published by Aqueduct Press. She is a Professor of Theatre and Afro American Studies at Smith College and the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio & Public Television. “Griots of the Galaxy,” a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future (2004). Andrea has received many awards for her writing from the National Endowment For The Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
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Joan Haran is a Research Associate at the University of Cardiff in the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen). She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick; her thesis on feminist science fiction was entitled “Re-Visioning Feminist Futures: Literature as Social Theory.” Joan’s work on science fiction is part of a broader research programme in feminist cultural studies with a particular focus on gender, technology and representation. Joan has had essays on sf published in the journals Extrapolation, Foundation, and in the edited collections Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers and Gender, Health and Healing: The Public/Private Divide. She is also conducting ethnographic research on WisCon, the Madison-based feminist science fiction convention.
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Cathy Hawkins is the assistant editor of Australian Feminist Studies. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “The Woman Who Saved the World: Re-imagining the Female Hero in 1950s Science Fiction Films,” allowed her to explore her love of science fiction and cinema history. Other research interests include the female body and popular culture. Her paper “The Monster Body of Myra Hindley” is published online in Scan 1:4 (2004). Cathy was part of the organizing committee for “Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves” held in 2003 at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is co-editor of a 2005 special edition of the journal Women’s Studies based on papers from the conference. She has taught women’s studies and cultural studies. Cathy lives in Sydney with her partner and four aliens cleverly disguised as domestic cats.
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Veronica Hollinger is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. She has published many articles on science fiction, with particular attention to feminist sf. Since 1990 she has been a co-editor of Science Fiction Studies, and she is also co-editor, with Joan Gordon, of two scholarly collections, Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (U Pennsylvania P, 1997) and Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (U Pennsylvania P, 2002). She is a past winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award.
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Josh Lukin was born in Youngstown, Ohio and attended Youngstown State University. He is the editor, with Samuel Delany, of Paradoxa 18: Fifties Fictions. His critical work has addressed authors as diverse as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Grant Morrison, Philip K. Dick, and Patricia Highsmith; he has also published extended interviews with L. Timmel Duchamp, William Tenn. and Chandler Davis. His acclaimed presentation at the 2002 convention of the Modern Language Association, “Feminist Science Fiction and the New Realism of the Body,” was his first foray into feminist sf criticism. You can find some of his work here. As of this writing, Dr. Lukin teaches in the English Department of Temple University, where he and novelist Don Belton occasionally bemuse the staff with their renditions of classic show tunes.
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Mary E. Papke is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton (1990), Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1993) and the editor of Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (2003). In addition, she has published essays on feminist theory, postmodern women writers, the unpublished drama of Evelyn Scott, the political theatre of Sean O’Casey, and Marxist literary criticism in early twentieth-century America, among other topics. All of these projects have focused significantly on issues of gender and class ideologies as well as the process of ethical and aesthetic evaluation.
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Wendy Pearson holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario, where she is working on a project dealing with indigenous performativity in Canada and Australia, as well as teaching in Film Studies. She has published a number of articles in the areas of science fiction, sexuality, and queer theory, and Canadian literature and film. In 2000, she was awarded the Pioneer Award by the Science Fiction Research Association.
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Cat Sparks designed the gorgeous cover of Daughters of Earth. She is the manager and editor of Agog! Press, which has produced five anthologies of (mostly) new Australian speculative fiction. She is also a writer, graphic designer, photographer and desktop publisher, with stories and artwork appearing in a selection of magazines and anthologies.
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Lisa Yaszek is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also serves as curator for the Bud Foote Science Fiction Collection. Her books include The Self Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary American Narrative (Routledge 2002) and Galactic Suburbia: Gender, Technology, and the Creation of Women’s Science Fiction (forthcoming from Ohio State University Press). Yaszek’s most recent essays on gender, science, and science fiction appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, and electronic book review. Her most recent research awards include an NEH Summer Stipend and the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award.