Vital: The Future of Healthcare

RM Ambrose is a writer of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Editor of Vital: The Future of Healthcare, and currently serves as Assistant Fiction Editor (and sometimes producer and narrator) at the Hugo Award winning StarShipSofa podcast. He attended Taos Toolbox in 2017 and is an Affiliate Member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

He is also Director of Web Services at an Academic Medical System in Southern California. RM has worked for non-profit organizations his entire professional career, and volunteers on the Finance Committees for multiple non-profits (including SFWA).

A lifelong Quaker and pacifist, his speculative essay about inventing rituals in Quakerism, “A Pacifist’s Coming of Age” appears in the February 2015 issue of Friends Journal.

RM draws on his background in Anthropology and Linguistics, music, world travel, Aikido, cycling, and careers in Information Technology, Banking and Higher Education. He speaks Spanish and Tagalog (Filipino), and has a particular interest in the cultures of Latin America and East Asia. He occasionally blogs at Liminal.IT.

Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi (born August 6, 1972 in Paonia, Colorado) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, John. W. Campbell, Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and has been nominated for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. Nonfiction essays of his have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in newspapers, including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune.

Bacigalupi's short fiction has been collected in the anthology Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008). His debut novel The Windup Girl, also published by Night Shade Books in September 2009, won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards in 2010. The Windup Girl was also named by Time as one of the Top 10 Books of 2009. Ship Breaker, published by Little, Brown in 2010, was awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for the "best book written for teens", and was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

David Brin is a scientist, tech speaker/consultant, and author. His novels about our survival and opportunities in the near future are EARTH and Existence. A film by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His 16 novels, including NY Times Bestsellers and Hugo Award winners, have been translated into more than twenty languages. Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web. An advisor to NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program, David appears frequently on shows such as Nova and The Universe and Life After People, speaking about science and future trends. His first non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. His second nonfiction book is VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood (2021). (Website: http://www.davidbrin.com/ )

TANANARIVE DUE (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of “The Twilight Zone” on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She is married to author Steven Barnes, with whom she collaborates on screenplays. They live with their son, Jason, and two cats.

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. His most recent books are a collection, The Promise of Space (2018), from Prime Books.and a novel, Mother Go (2017), an audiobook original from Audible.

In 2016 Centipede Press published a career retrospective Masters of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly. His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel, he has co-edited five anthologies. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s. Coming in January 2020, King Of The Dogs, Queen Of The Cats, a novella from Subterranean Press. Find him on the web at www.jimkelly.net.

Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, editor, and translator from Brooklyn, NY. He's the author of The Middling Affliction (Caezik, 2022) and Eridani's Crown (UFO Publishing, 2019) fantasy novels.

Over 120 of his short stories appeared in various magazines and anthologies since 2010, including Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, etc. He's the winner of the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction.

He edits the Unidentified Funny Objects series of anthologies and Future Science Fiction Digest. His other projects as editor include The Cackle of Cthulhu (Baen Books), Humanity 2.0 (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick), Coffee: 14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic (UFO Publishing) and Dark Expanse: Surviving the Collapse (Deorc Enterprises).

You can visit his official home page and blog at alexshvartsman.com

Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist Caroline M. Yoachim is the author of over a hundred published short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her work has been reprinted in multiple year’s best anthologies and translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Czech. Yoachim’s debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out in 2016. For more, check out her website at http://carolineyoachim.com