Alexis Hall

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the 21st century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret.

He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.

He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car.

Talia Hibbert

Talia Hibbert is a USA Today bestselling author who lives in a bedroom full of books. Supposedly, there is a world beyond that room, but she has yet to drum up enough interest to investigate.

She writes steamy, diverse romance because she believes that people of marginalised identities need honest and positive representation. Her interests include makeup, junk food, and unnecessary sarcasm. Talia and her many books reside in the English Midlands.

Visit her website at taliahibbert.com.

Jenny Holiday

Jenny Holiday is a USA Today bestselling author whose books have been featured by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, and NPR. She grew up in Minnesota and started writing when her fourth-grade teacher gave her a notebook to fill with stories. When she’s not working on her next book, she likes to hike, throw theme parties, and watch other people sing karaoke. Jenny lives in London, Ontario, Canada.

Chloe Jacobs

Chloe Jacobs is a native of nowhere and everywhere, having jumped around to practically every Province of Canada before finally settling in Ontario where she has now been living for a respectable number of years. Her husband and son are the two best people in the entire world, but they also make her wish she’d at least gotten a female cat. No such luck. And although the day job keeps her busy, she carves out as much time as possible to write. Bringing new characters to life and finding out what makes them tick and how badly she can make them suffer is one of her greatest pleasures, almost better than chocolate and fuzzy pink bunny slippers.

Liz Jacobs

Liz Jacobs came over with her family from Russia at the age of 11, as a Jewish refugee. All in all, her life has gotten steadily better since that moment. They settled in an ultra­-liberal haven in the middle of New York State, which sort of helped her with the whole “grappling with her sexuality” business.

She has spent a lot of her time flitting from passion project to passion project, but writing remains her constant. She has flown planes, drawn, made jewelry, had an improbable internet encounter before it was cool, and successfully wooed the love of her life in a military-­style campaign. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her essay on her family’s experience with immigration.

She currently lives with her wife in Massachusetts, splitting her time between her day job, writing, and watching a veritable boatload of British murder mysteries.

Mairi Kilaine

Mairi Kilaine writes primarily women’s fiction and YA,with a special focus on science fiction, fantasy, and all things geeky. A proud member of the 2015 Pitch Wars Mentee class, she is the author of Miss B’s Christmas Mix, a geeky band director romance, which is featured in the holiday-themed anthology Christmas Nookies.

When she isn’t writing, Mairi enjoys fangirling, dancing badly, singing loudly, and breakfast foods prepared by other people. She shares a tiny overpriced apartment with her large family and ancient dog in the East Bay. Shout “Lafayette!” and she will rap Guns and Ships with precision.

Elizabeth King

Elizabeth King is a Regency historical romance author and winner of the 2016 Golden Heart for historical romance. A tax lawyer, she spends her days writing tax law textbooks but, for obvious reasons, prefers to escape into the fictional world of romance. She has an embarrassingly large collection of DVDs and when not writing she spends far too much time binge watching movies and TV box sets. With both children away studying, she now lives with just her husband and three very demanding cats in the beautiful Marlborough wine region of New Zealand.

Jackie Lau

Jackie Lau decided she wanted to be a writer when she was in grade two, sometime between writing “The Heart That Got Lost” and “The Land of Shapes.” She later studied engineering and worked as a geophysicist before turning to writing romance novels.

Jackie lives in Toronto with her husband, and despite living in Canada her whole life, she hates winter. When she’s not writing, she enjoys cooking, hiking, eating too much gelato, and reading on the balcony when it’s raining.

Vanora Lawless headshot

Vanora Lawless

Vanora Lawless is a bisexual genderfluid Canadian with ADHD and a passion for telling love stories set in magical or niche historical worlds. A graduate of Saint Mary’s University, Vanora has a B.A, majoring in psychology. As a Nova Scotian, loving long walks on the beach is practically a law, so Vanora takes every possible opportunity to explore the best sandy shores. In spare time between crafting new worlds and stories, Vanora can be found behind the lens of a camera or in a blanket burrito with a good book.