Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Saturday Night Reader, Fireside Magazine, The Book Smugglers, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place. Plus, he reviews books for Lightspeed. His favorite things to consume include nachos, milkshakes, and narrative. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging”, “exclamatory”, and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, historian, and actor. He is the author of The Brimstone Files, and his latest historical work Mavericks of War was called a “visceral read that is also an important piece of scholarship” by Pulitzer-Prize winner Richard Rhodes. He is a Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and teaches creative writing at Google, Youtube, and for private clients.

Lina Rather lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan where she works at a historical archive. In her spare time, she cooks, collects terrible 90’s comics, and writes melancholy stories. Her work has appeared venues including Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, and Lightspeed. You can find her and her other stories at her website, linarather.wordpress.com, or on Twitter as @LinaRather.

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

Aaron DaMommio is a husband, father, writer, and juggler who came to Austin, Texas for college and never left. During the day, he tries to make the world safe for users of complex software programs via technical writing. Other stories he’s had published online include “Daughter of Mettle” and “The Van Helsing Women’s Shelter.”

M.E. Owen writes science fiction, fantasy and crime, often in the same story. This is her second appearance in FFO (the previous was 31-E as M. Elizabeth Castle, and why yes, a lot has changed since then).

She lives on the wet side of Washington state, and when not writing, she kayaks, plays with transportation geodatabases, and occasionally throws knives (not all at once, but that would be cool).

Her short work has also appeared in Abyss & Apex, Fireside Fiction, Fiction River, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Survival Instincts, a science fiction noir, is scheduled for publication in early 2018. You can keep up with her at MEOwen.com.