The Literary Tarot: Authors
To find out more about the star-studded, uber talented team of authors who contributed to this project, please keep a-scrolling! For details about the creators who brought this project to life, please take a look at the Literary Tarot Creators page.
Joe Abercrombie
Pairing Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with the Four of Parchment
Joe Abercrombie was born in Lancaster, England, and, as a kid, read a lot of fantasy books. After spending ten years working as a TV editor, he decided to try and write one. The result was The First Law trilogy, and the first volume, The Blade Itself, was published in 2006. Fifteen years later, he is a full-time author living with his wife, Lou, and their three children in Bath, and he has published twelve novels and a collection of short stories, including the Shattered Sea and Age of Madness trilogies.
Charlie Jane Anders
Pairing Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones with the Knight of Light
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy coming in April 2021, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
Seven Asmund
Pairing Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas with The Hierophant
Seven is a queer author and publisher of poetry, fiction, roleplaying games, card games, tarot, and more under their business, Publishing Goblin, LLC. Their biggest project yet, the Alleyman’s Tarot, brought together 130 artists to create a truly unique divination deck. They live in Colorado with two friends and two cats, one soft but sharp, the other soft but stinky.
Margaret Atwood
Pairing Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre with the Queen of Light
Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. Itis the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series. Her other works of fiction include Cat’s Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddamTrilogy; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. She lives in Toronto.
Vita Ayala
Pairing Homer’s The Odyssey with the King of Light
Vita Ayala is a queer Afro-Puerto Rican writer born and bred in New York City, where they grew up dreaming dreams of dancing on far-away worlds, fighting monsters on the block, and racing the fish along the bottom of the ocean. Their work includes The Wilds (Black Mask Studios), Submerged (Vault), Quarter Killer (Comixology), Supergirl (DC), Xena: Warrior Princess (Dynamite), New Mutants (Marvel), and Livewire (Valiant), among others.
Ellen Azevedo
Pairing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream with the Seven of Light
Ellen Azevedo holds an MFA from SFSU. Her debut publication appeared in F(r)iction #16: Monsters. Her work explores monsters, magic, and feminism with a tone of dark humor. She lives in Northern California with her husband and her cat.
Leigh Bardugo
Pairing Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden with the Ace of Parchment
Leigh Bardugo is the New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House and the creator of the Grishaverse, which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy (now a Netflix original series), the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology, The Language of Thorns, and The Lives of Saints—with more to come. Her short stories can be found in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Leigh grew up in Southern California and graduated from Yale University. These days she lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Damian Barr
Pairing Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the Six of Light
Damian Barr is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and journalist. His memoir, Maggie & Me, won Stonewall Writer of the Year and was named Sunday Times Memoir of the Year. His debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, was shortlisted for six major awards and named a Book of the Year in the Observer, Irish Times and The Times. He has written columns for The Times, Sunday Times and Big Issue and hosted Front Row on BBC Radio 4. Damian brought books back to television with The Big Scottish Book Club; he also hosts Shelf Isolation on the BBC. In 2020, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and gained his PhD in Creative Writing. He created the Literary Salon in 2008.
Brian Michael Bendis
Pairing H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds with the King of Ink
Brian Michael Bendis is a Peabody award winning, Amazon and New York Times bestselling comics creator. He is most known for co- creating Miles Morales, Jessica Jones, Maria Hill, Ironheart, Naomi and dozens of other characters and stories that populate the Marvel, DC and all the new universes of Jinxworld. Brian is Executive Producer of the Academy-Award winning hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Brian received an honorary doctorate in the arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a Certificate of Excellence from the Central Intelligence Agency. Brian’s TED talk, MIT lecture and appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers are available at Jinxworld.com.
Holly Black
Pairing Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter with the Four of Ink
Holly Black is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of over thirty fantasy novels for kids and teens. She has been a finalist for an Eisner and a Lodestar Award, and the recipient of the Mythopoeic Award, a Nebula, and a Newbery Honor. Her books have been translated into 32 languages worldwide and adapted for film. She currently lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret library.
Joel Kim Booster
Pairing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with the Queen of Ink
Joel Kim Booster is an LA-based writer and comedian. His work has been featured on Conan, The Late Late Show with James Corden and Comedy Central among others. He’s written for the Other Two, Big Mouth and Billy on the Street.
Terry Brooks
Pairing J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with the Ace of Ink
A writer since the age of ten, Terry Brooks published his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, in 1977. He has written over forty bestselling novels, as well as adaptations of the movies Hook and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and a memoir on his writing life titled Sometimes The Magic Works. He has sold over fifty million copies of his books domestically and is published worldwide. Season One of The Shannara Chronicles TV series aired in January 2016. His next novel, Child of Light, will publish in October 2021. The author lives with his wife Judine in the Pacific Northwest.
Charlie Claire Burgess
Pairing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” with the Eight of Quills
Charlie Claire Burgess (they/them) is a writer, artist, and tarot reader who makes decks, teaches tarot, and slings cards in Portland, OR. They are the creator of Fifth Spirit Tarot, an independent tarot deck that centers LGBTQIA2+ people, and the author of The Fifth Spirit Tarot Guide. Their fiction and non-fiction is published or forthcoming in F(r)iction, Hunger Mountain, New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. They received their MFA at Vanderbilt University. Charlie is currently working on an oracle deck and a tarot book about evolving the tarot for a world beyond binaries.
Chelsea Cain
Pairing Agathe Christie’s Poirot Investigates with The Emperor
Chelsea Cain is the author of the New York Times bestselling Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell thriller series (Heartsick, Sweetheart, Evil at Heart, The Night Season, Kill You Twice, and Let Me Go), and the Kick Lannigan book (One Kick). Her Portland-based thrillers, described by The New York Times as “steamy and perverse,” have been published in over 30 languages, recommended on The Today Show, and appeared in episodes of HBO’s “True Blood” and ABC’s “Castle.” Stephen King included two of her books in his top ten favorite books of the year, and NPR named Heartsick one of the best 100 thrillers ever written. According to Booklist, “Popular entertainment just doesn’t get much better than this.” One Kick is currently in production as a tv series called Gone, starring Chris Noth (“Law & Order,” “Sex in the City”). Season one of Gone is currently airing in Australia, Germany, and France. Chelsea is also the author of Dharma Girl, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, and several other books, and comic books, including the eight-issue, Eisner-nominated series, Mockingbird. Chelsea is currently working on another thriller, called Bad Actor, two ongoing comic book series that launched in summer 2018, a couple of TV projects, and a shorter bio.
K-Ming Chang
Pairing Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West with The Magician
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of The New York Times Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020) that was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short story collection, Gods of Want, is forthcoming from One World in June 2022. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.
Dan Chaon
Pairing Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra with the Knight of Ligh
Dan Chaon is the author of six books of fiction, and has a new novel called Sleepwalk due out from Henry Holt in April 2022. He lives in Cleveland with his dog, Ray Bradbury.
Gina Chung
Pairing E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View with the Three of Ink
Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2021–2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. She is the author of Sea Change, a novel, and a collection of short stories, Green Frog, which are forthcoming from Vintage in 2023. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, and F(r)iction, among others. Find her at gina-chung.com.
Cassandra Clare
Pairing Dickens’s Great Expectations with the Page of Light
Cassandra Clare is the author of the #1 New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Shadowhunter Chronicles. She is also the co-author of the bestselling fantasy series Magisterium with Holly Black. The Shadowhunter Chronicles have been adapted as both a major motion picture and a television series. Her books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Cassandra lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and three fearsome cats.
Ezra Claytan Daniels
Pairing L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables with the Nine of Light
Ezra Claytan Daniels is a multidisciplinary artist and creator of the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Award-nominated graphic novels, Upgrade Soul and BTTM FDRS. Ezra’s work has been featured on the Criterion Channel and is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. Ezra resides in Los Angeles, CA, where he writes for film and television, most recently on the upcoming 3rd season of Doom Patrol for HBO Max.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Pairing Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations with the King of Quills
Kelly Sue DeConnick is best known for comic books like Marvel’s Captain Marvel, Pretty Deadly (co-created with artist Emma Ríos), Bitch Planet (co-created with artist Valentine De Landro), and DC Comics’s Aquaman. DeConnick and her husband, Matt Fraction, currently develop television for Legendary TV as Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc.
Maggie Downs
Pairing Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with the Eight of Ink
Maggie Downs is an award-winning journalist and the author of the memoir Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime. Her work has been anthologized in Best Women’s Travel Writing and Lonely Planet’s True Stories from the World’s Best Writers, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and McSweeney’s, among others. She is based in Palm Springs, California.
H.E. Edgmon
Pairing Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Strength
H.E. Edgmon (he/they) is a high school and college dropout, a militant queer, and an author of fantasy both irreverent and radicalizing. His stories will always center the perspective of Indigenous people, trans people, and survivors of trauma. At present, he’s probably biting off more than he can chew, emulating the aesthetic of Dwayne from The Lost Boys (1987), and living out the found family trope in Brooklyn. Online, he can most often be found on Twitter @heedgmon.
K.D. Edwards
Pairing Anna Sewen’s Black Beauty with The Sun
K.D. Edwards lives and writes in North Carolina, but has spent time in Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, New Hampshire, Montana, and Washington. (Common theme until NC: Snow. So, so much snow.) Mercifully short careers in foodservice, interactive television, corporate banking, retail management, and bariatric furniture have led to a much less short career in Higher Education. The first book in his urban fantasy series The Tarot Sequence, called The Last Sun, was published by Pyr in June 2018, followed by The Hanged Man. The third installment, The Hourglass Throne, is expected in 2021. K.D. is represented by Sara Megibow at kt literary, and Kim Yau at Echo Lake for entertainment rights.
Amal El-Mohtar
Pairing L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon with The Star
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and criticism. She is the science fiction and fantasy columnist for the New York Times Book Review and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a novella which has received several honors including the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, and Locus Awards. She lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com.
Stephen Fry
Pairing The Iliad with the Six of Wands
Stephen Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director and all-round national treasure. Fry has written and presented several documentary series, contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines, appears frequently on radio, reads for voice-overs and has written four novels and three volumes of autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles and his latest, More Fool Me. For the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, during the summer of 2018, Stephen gave 13 presentations of his trilogy of one-man shows (39 performances in all) based on his book Mythos. In the summer of 2019, Stephen toured 7 UK theatres with the shows.
Race Garber
Pairing Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel with the Five of Ink
Race Garber has progressed from angst-ridden teenage poetry, to flash fiction and short stories, to a Socratic dialogue comic script about a certain bat-related hero (unauthorized and unpublished), to co-authoring a novel. His work has been published in F(r)iction #6, Tethered by Letters Quarterly, Boned: A Collection of Skeletal Fiction, and briefing to the U.S. Supreme Court. His hobbies-turned-work include writing, developing board games, wouldn’t-it-be-fun-to-make-a-literary-themed-tarot-deck, and training a balcony squirrel (pro-tip: anything cheaper than walnuts leads to angry stares of furry indignation).
Roxane Gay
Pairing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with the King of Parchment
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity.
S.T. Gibson
Pairing Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables with the Six of Parchment
S.T. Gibson is a poet, author, and village wise woman in training. She holds a Bachelors degree in Creative Writing from UNC Asheville, and a Masters of Theological Studies from Princeton Seminary. Currently, she lives in Boston with her fiancé and spoiled Persian cat.
Kieron Gillen
Pairing Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the Five of Quills
Kieron Gillen first came to attention as a comic creator with his 2006’s Phonogram, with Jamie McKelvie. He and Jamie formed into a gestalt monster that rampaged against the next fifteen years of comics, culminating with critical and smash hit The Wicked + the Divine. When not with Jamie, he has co-created books such as DIE, The Ludocrats, Once & Future, Three, Uber and more. When not making his own worlds, he has worked on Marvel Comic’s biggest books, such as Uncanny X-men, Young Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, Star Wars, Eternals and Darth Vader (where he co-created Doctor Aphra).
Christopher Golden
Pairing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World with the Seven of Parchment
Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling author of Ararat, Road of Bones, Red Hands, and many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of Baltimore, Joe Golem, and other titles in The Outerverse comic book universe. As editor, his anthologies include Hex Life, The New Dead, and Seize the Night. Golden is also a screenwriter, producer, video game writer, and co-host of the podcast Defenders Dialogue. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.
Chloe Gong
Pairing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the Page of Parchment
Chloe Gong is the New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights and its sequel, Our Violent Ends. She is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she double-majored in English and International Relations. Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, Chloe is now located in New York, pretending to be a real adult. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok under @TheChloeGong or check out her website at TheChloeGong.com.
Lev Grossman
Pairing Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur with The World
Lev Grossman is the author of four New York Times bestselling novels, including his novel for children The Silver Arrow and the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy, which has been published in 30 countries and adapted for television. He wrote the story and script for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, a movie that appeared on Amazon in 2021. Grossman is also a journalist whose work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, The Believer, Salon, Slate, and many others. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.
Hart Hanson
Pairing Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain with the Page of Ink
Hart Hanson is best known for creating the Fox television series Bones, which ran for 12 seasons, making Bones the longest-running scripted hour-long series in Fox history. He is also the author of The Driver, a novel published by Dutton Books in August, 2017. The Driver was featured on many “Best of” lists including the New York Time’s Best Crime Novels of 2017 and garnered starred reviews from Booklist, iBooks, and Library Journal. Hart is at work on several television and book projects. Hart and his wife, Brigitte, split their time between Venice – the one in California – and San Francisco.
Alix E. Harrow
Pairing Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Justice
Alix E. Harrow is an ex-historian currently living in Kentucky with her husband and their semi-feral children. She won a Hugo for her short fiction and debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her second novel, The Once and Future Witches, was named as one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR Books.
Dani Hedlund
Pairing Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with The Moon
After the publication of her first novel at the age of eighteen, Dani Hedlund founded the international literary nonprofit Brink Literacy Project (formerly Tethered by Letters). Over the course of the last decade, Brink has grown into one of the largest independently-funded literary nonprofits in the nation, with bases across the US, UK, and Southeast Asia. She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of F(r)iction, an art and literary collection specializing in boundary-defying work. Since its inception in 2015, F(r)iction has risen to critical acclaim, becoming one of the fastest-growing literary journals in the world. In her ever-elusive free time, Dani lectures about the ins and outs of the publishing industry, writes very weird fiction, and runs a strange little board game company called Bad Hipster Games.
Jonathan Hickman
Pairing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with the Ten of Quills
Jonathan Hickman is the visionary talent behind the award-winning Pax Romana, East of West, and Manhattan Projects. He also occasionally plies his trade at places like Marvel working on books like the Avengers and the X-Men. Jonathan lives in South Carolina, along with his family and friends. Most of them have never read a word he’s written, which is probably for the best.
Faylita Hicks
Pairing Dante’s Inferno with Judgement
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry and serve as the 2021 Poet-in-Residence with Civil Rights Corps. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Broadway Advocacy Coalition, The Dots Between, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and the Right of Return USA. Their work is featured or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, Slate, Texas Observer, Yale Review, and others. Visit their website at www.FaylitaHicks.com.
Mel Hilario
Pairing L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with the Three of Light
Mel Hilario has an MFA from Mills College, is a recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and has done residencies with Hedgebrook, VONA, Las Dos Brujas, and Writing by Writers. She co-created Debian Perl, Digital Detective: The Memory Thief, a middle grade graphic novel sometimes described as Blade Runner for children. Partnered with Debian Perl teammates Lauren Davis and Katie Longua, Mel is one-third of the Bay Area-based studio, Triple Dream Comics. She lives in Oakland, California with her spouse, two cats, and way, way too many books. Despite her last name, she’s only occasionally funny.
Tini Howard
Pairing Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” with Temperance
Tini Howard is a writer best known for her work on the X-Men at Marvel Comics, including the summer’s blockbuster tarot-themed event, X of Swords. She lives in Los Angeles and writes at tinihoward.substack.com.
Patricia A. Jackson
Pairing Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers with the Three of Parchment
Patricia A. Jackson is a high school teacher in Pennsylvania. Her urban fantasy Forging A Nightmare debuts in November 2021 from Angry Robot Books, UK.
Margaret Jameson
Pairing Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen with the Queen of Parchment
Margaret Jameson’s short fiction has appeared in literary and art publications since 2016. She is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Wollheim Memorial Scholarship awarded by the New York Science Fiction Society.
“The Women,” her most recent published story, is featured in F(r)iction #18, released in April 2021. For more information, visit www.margaretjameson.com, or find her on twitter as @tinydiva or Instagram as @margaretjameson_.
Stephen Graham Jones
Pairing W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” with the Three of Quills
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Only Good Indians and Night of the Mannequins. Next is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
Tara Laskowski
Pairing Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” with the Four of Light
Tara Laskowski’s debut suspense novel One Night Gone won the Agatha Award, Macavity Award, and the Anthony Award. Her second novel, The Mother Next Door, was published in October 2021. She also wrote two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders. She has also won the Agatha Award and Thriller Award for her short fiction and was the longtime editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly. A graduate of Susquehanna University and George Mason University, Tara grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia.
Victor LaValle
Pairing H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” with The Tower
Victor LaValle is the author of seven works for fiction and two comic books. His most recent comic, Eve, is an Afrofuturist story about an 11-year-old girl tasked with saving the world after cataclysmic climate change. He has been the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, and Bram Stoker Award among many others. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Key to Southeast Queens. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York with his wife and kids.
Talia Lavin
Pairing Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick with The Devil
Talia Lavin is a freelance journalist who’s had bylines in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Washington Post and many more places. She is the author of the recent book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, about the metastasis of white supremacy online. She is also the host of the podcast Moby Dick Energy, which goes through Herman Melville’s queer whaling masterpiece chapter by chapter with an array of guests.
Kelly Link
Pairing Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist with the Two of Parchment
Kelly is the author of four collections, most recently Get in Trouble (Random House). She and her partner Gavin J. Grant are the founders of Small Beer Press and publish a twice-yearly zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her bookstore Book Moon (www.bookmoonbooks.com) is based in Easthampton, Massachusetts. You can find her online at www.twitter.com/haszombiesinit.
Marjorie Liu
Pairing Grendel of Beowulf with the Queen of Quills
Marjorie Liu is an attorney and New York Times bestselling novelist and comic book writer. Her work at Marvel includes X-23, Black Widow, Han Solo, Dark Wolverine and Astonishing X-Men. She is also the co-creator of Monstress from Image Comics, which has won multiple Hugo Awards, British Fantasy Awards, the Harvey Award, and five Eisner Awards, making Liu the first-ever woman (and woman of color) to win an Eisner in the Best Writer category.
E. Lockhart
Pairing Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with the Ten of Parchment
E. Lockhart is author of the #1 New York Times bestselling novel, We Were Liars. She invented the superhero Whistle for DC Comics. Other novels include Again Again, Genuine Fraud and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, which was a National Book Award finalist and a Printz Award honor book. She has a doctorate in English literature from Columbia.
Danny Lore
Pairing Marie de France’s “Bisclavret” with the Seven of Ink
Danny Lore (they/them) is a black writer and editor based in NYC, who writes across the SFFH spectrum in both prose and comics. They’ve written comics for publishers such as Marvel, DC, Vault and more. They’ve had short fiction published by Fireside, Fiyah, Nightlight and others. When they’re not writing, they are playing video games, building gunpla and doing makeup—or trolling their long-suffering cat and wife.
Carmen Maria Machado
Pairing Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with the Ace of Light
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” She is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Isaac Marion
Pairing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with The Hermit
Isaac Marion is the author of the New York Timesbestselling Warm Bodies Series, which was adapted into a film in 2013. He has published several stories in F(r)iction and is a contributing editor. He lives off-grid in the central Washington desert.
Mariah McCourt
Pairing Jane Austen’s Persuasion with the Five of Parchment
Mariah McCourt is a New York Times bestselling graphic novelist, nominator, and squidly octopi fan. Ash & Thorn is her latest series.
Mark Millar
Pairing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with the Ace of Quills
Mark Millar is a New York Times bestselling comic-book writer, Hollywood producer and President of Netflix’s Millarworld Division in Los Angeles. His work includes Jupiter’s Legacy, Kick-Ass, Old Man Logan, Kingsman, Wanted, Superman: Red Son and Civil War, Marvel’s biggest-selling graphic novel of all time. His first Netflix show, Jupiter’s Legacy, is a $100 million dollar series streaming on the service in 2021. The King’s Man, starring Ralph Fiennes, was released by 20th Century Pictures in March 2021. He has won numerous awards, both inside and outside the comic-book industry, and lives in his native Scotland with his wife Lucy, CEO of Netflix’s Millarworld Division. He has three daughters.
Laura Miller
Pairing Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the Nine of Quills
Laura Miller is the books and culture columnist for Slate. She is a co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked for twenty years. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word” column. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000). She lives in Maine.
Madeline Miller
Pairing Shakespeare’s King Lear with The High Priestess
Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles, which was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. Miller is also the author of Circe, which was the winner of the Indies Choice Best Adult Fiction of the Year Award, and the Indies Choice Best Audiobook of the Year Award. Circe also received The Red Tentacle Award, an American Library Association Alex Award, the 2018 Elle Big Book Award, was short-listed for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times Bestseller. She lives outside Philadelphia.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Pairing Edith Wharton‘s The Age of Innocence with The Lovers
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the novels Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, Certain Dark Things, Untamed Shore, and a bunch of other books. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (aka. Cthulhu’s Daughters).
Erin Morgenstern
Pairing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with the Five of Light
Erin Morgenstern is the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus (one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time) and The Starless Sea. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She has a degree in theater from Smith College and currently lives in the middle of the woods in western Massachusetts with her husband and an absurdly cute cat. She started reading tarot cards over twenty years ago and has an ever-growing collection of tarot and oracle decks.
Carrie Morgridge
Pairing Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book with the Two of Ink
Carrie Morgridge is the Vice President of The Morgridge Family Foundation and the award-winning author of Every Gift Matters – How Your Passion Can Change the World and The Spirit of the Trail. Carrie is an internationally sought-after speaker at education advocacy forums, poverty alleviation conferences, and more. Recent appearances include two TED Talks and serving as a panel member for MIT Solve events. She is on the Advisory Board at sparks&honey, a cultural consultancy, and frequently presents as a thought leader on The Future of Giving. Carrie has completed ten Ironman competitions to date and never says no to a game of tennis.
Alec Nevala-Lee
Pairing Sophocles’s Antigone with the Two of Quills
Alec Nevala-Lee was a 2019 Hugo and Locus Award finalist for Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Dey Street Books/HarperCollins), which was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by The Economist. He is the author of three suspense novels from Penguin, including The Icon Thief, and has contributed to such publications as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. His next book will be a biography of the architectural designer, Buckminster Fuller, which is scheduled to be released by HarperCollins in 2022.
Celeste Ng
Pairing T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with The Hanged Man
Celeste Ng is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and has been awarded the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, the Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Celeste graduated from Harvard University and the University of Michigan and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Benjamin Percy
Pairing Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” with the Seven of Quills
Benjamin Percy is the author of five novels—mostly recently The Ninth Metal—three story collections—including Suicide Woods—and a book of essays titled Thrill Me that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. He writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics.
Rachel Pollack
Pairing Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex with the Knight of Quills
Rachel Pollack is the author of 46 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, and Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award. Her work also includes non-fiction works, in particular a series of books on Tarot cards, including Seventy-Eight Degrees Of Wisdom, published in 1980 and in print continuously ever since. She is also a poet, and a visual artist, having created The Shining Tribe Tarot deck. Her work has been translated into 15 languages, and she has taught in 13 countries, including China, Australia, and New Zealand. With David Vine, she translated Sophocles’s Oidipous Tyrannos as Tyrant Oidipous. Her most recent book is The Beatrix Gates. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
Rebecca Roanhorse
Pairing Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Death
Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestseller and a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer. She has published multiple award-winning short stories and five novels, including two in The Sixth World Series, Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Race to the Sun, and her latest novel, the Hugo and Nebula finalist Black Sun. Her short fiction can be found in Apex Magazine, New Suns, The Mythic Dream, and various anthologies. She has also written for Marvel Comics and for television, and has projects optioned by Amazon Studios, Netflix, and Paramount TV. She lives with her family in Northern New Mexico and can be found at rebeccaroanhorse.com.
Chris Roberson
Pairing Edgar Rice Burrough’s A Princess of Mars with the Knight of Parchment
Chris Roberson is the co-creator with artist Michael Allred of iZombie, the basis of the hit CW television series, and the writer of several New York Times best-selling Cinderella miniseries set in the world of Bill Willingham’s Fables. He is also the co-creator of Edison Rex with artist Dennis Culver, and the co-writer of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D, Witchfinder, Rise of the Black Flame, and other titles set in the world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. In addition to his numerous comics projects, Roberson has written more than a dozen novels and three dozen short stories.
Damian Rogers
Pairing Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book with the Nine of Parchment
Damian Rogers is a writer and card reader. She is the author of the memoir An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments (Knopf Canada), a meditation on trauma, language, and memory that Margaret Atwood called, “Evocative, beautifully written, heartbreaking.” She is also the author of two poetry collections, Dear Leader and Paper Radio. Damian recently launched a weekly tarot newsletter titled If It’s Alive, Feed It on the platform Substack. She is currently finishing a new poetry collection about wizards and is working on a novel set in Chicago during the nineties.
Patrick Rothfuss
Pairing Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote with The Fool
Patrick Rothfuss is the New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear. In March 2007, The Name of the Wind was published and met with surprising success. In the years since, it has been translated into 30 languages and become a bestseller in several countries. Wise Man’s Fear came out in March 2011, immediately hitting #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. When not working on the third book of the series, Pat plays with his kids and runs Worldbuilders, a geek-centered charity that has raised more than a million dollars for Heifer International.
Greg Rucka
Pairing Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the Knight of Ink
Greg Rucka is the Portland, Oregon, author of way too many comic books, over two dozen novels, and a couple of screenplays. He is co-creator of The Old Guard with artist Leandro Fernández, which was made into a movie of the same name. Occasionally, he writes things that get on lists and sometimes he gets an award. He’s proudest of the GLAAD Awards his work has won over the years, to be honest. But mostly, he is the father of two brilliant children and one neurotic dog, and is married to writer Jennifer Van Meter, who inspires him every day. And yes, he is a romantic.
Valerie San Filippo
Pairing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden with the Four of Quills
Valerie San Filippo received her MFA in Fiction from Stony Brook Southampton. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, PANK, TSROnline, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and a recipient of George R. R. Martin’s Miskatonic Scholarship. Find her at valeriesanfilippo.com.
Samuel Sattin
Pairing John Milton’s Paradise Lost with the Eight of Light
Samuel Sattin is a writer and coffee addict. He adapted the Oscar-nominated film Wolf Walkers to a graphic novel, and authored forthcoming books such as Buzzing (Little Brown for Young Readers, 2023) and Side Quest (2024). Additionally, his non-fiction work has appeared in The Nib, NPR, and elsewhere, and he works in animation development. Graduating with an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts and a Creative Writing MFA from Mills College, he now lives in Oakland, California with his wife/assassin and two cats.
Scott Snyder
Pairing Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” with the Nine of Ink
Scott Snyder has written comics for both DC and Marvel, including the best-selling series American Vampire, Batman, and Swamp Thing, and is the author of the story collection Voodoo Heart. He also co-created the Wytches comic book with Jock. He lives on Long Island with his wife Jeanie and his sons Jack and Emmett.
Simon Tolkien
Pairing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with The Chariot
After studying history at Oxford, Simon became a barrister in London specializing in criminal law. This experience provided the settings for his first books which were murder mysteries/courtroom dramas. However, history slowly took over. Orders from Berlin is about a Nazi plot to kill Churchill in 1940 and No Man’s Land is set in the mines and country houses of Edwardian England and on the battlefields of the First World War. Simon is currently writing a book about an American in the Spanish Civil War that is due for publication in 2022. He is the grandson of J.R.R.Tolkien and is a director of the Tolkien Estate.
C. Spike Trotman
Pairing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance with the Ten of Ink
C. Spike Trotman was born in DC, raised in MD, and lives in IL. A cartoonist, she founded Iron Circus Comics in 2007, which has since grown to become the region’s largest comics publisher. Her notable work includes the webcomic Templar, Arizona, the Smut Peddler series of erotic comic anthologies, and Poorcraft, a guide to frugal living. A Kickstarter early adopter, she pioneered the model that’s since reshaped the small press, jump-starting the current renaissance of alt-comics anthologies. Iron Circus is also the first comics publisher of note to fully incorporate crowdfunding into its business model, inventing one of the single most effective uses of new media in comics publishing.
Catherynne M. Valente
Pairing Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” with The Empress
Catherynne M. Valente is the NYT bestselling author of forty works of speculative fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She won the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards as well as being a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, small son, and ridiculously large cat.
Jeff VanderMeer
Pairing Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis with the Six of Quills
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Southern Reach Trilogy, the first volume of which, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. VanderMeer’s latest novel is the eco-thriller Hummingbird Salamander and his short story “Secret Life” will be released this year as a graphic novel by Theo Ellsworth. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change and has written nonfiction for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Atlantic.com, among others. VanderMeer lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cats, plants, and bird feeders.
Mark Waid
Pairing Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest with the Page of Quills
Since entering the comics field in the mid-1980s, Mark Waid, a New York Timesbestselling author, has been an editor, a writer, a publisher, an artist, a colorist, a letterer, a publicist, a creative consultant, a chief creative officer, and even a comic shop owner. As a writer, he’s produced nearly 2000 stories (and counting). Among them are his collaboration with artist Alex Ross, Kingdom Come, one of the all-time highest-selling American graphic novels, and long, critically acclaimed runs on Flash, Daredevil, Archie, Fantastic Four, and many, many other titles. Currently, he serves as Publisher for Humanoids U.S.
Ayelet Waldman
Pairing Jane Austen’s Emma with the Two of Light
Ayelet Waldman is a novelist, essayist and screenwriter. Her books include Love & Treasure and A Really Good Day. She is one of the creators of the Emmy-nominated and Peabody-Award-winning Unbelievable on Netflix.
G. Willow Wilson
Pairing William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair with the Wheel of Fortune
G. Willow Wilson is the author of the acclaimed novel The Bird King (2019), co-creator of the Hugo and American Book Award-winning series Ms Marvel (2013–2018), and has written for some of the world’s best-known superhero comic book series, including The X-Men, Superman and Wonder Woman. Her first novel, Alif the Unseen, won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. In 2015, she won the Graphic Literature Innovator Prize at the PEN America Literary Awards. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Seattle.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Pairing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with the Ten of Light
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, The Misfit’s Manifesto, The Chronology of Water, and the forthcoming novel Thrust. She is the founder of Corporeal Writing, a non-academic interdisciplinary Art Lab in Portland, Oregon. She is an Oregon Book Award winner, a PNBA award winner, and other literary distinctions, but mostly she is a very good swimmer.