Libia Brenda is a Mexican editor, writer and translator, two-time Hugo Award Nominee (she was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo), and a Climate Imagination Fellow with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. She writes speculative fiction, mainly short stories, as well as nonfiction and essays about science fiction and fantastic literature. She frequently collaborates with various interdisciplinary and collective projects like the Cúmulo de Tesla collective, a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences, and Mexicona: Imaginación y Futuro, among others. Her work has been translated from Spanish into English, Italian, and Portuguese. She is the author of the short story collection De qué silencio vienes and the editor of Odo Ediciones, an independent, nonprofit, and crowdfunded editorial project that publishes science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction from Mexico with a pacifist-anarchist and feminist approach.
Gu Shi (pen name of Gu Zongpei) is a speculative fiction writer and a senior urban planner. She has been working as a researcher at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design since 2012. Her short fiction works have won two Galaxy Awards for Chinese Science Fiction and three Chinese Nebula (Xingyun) Awards. She published her first story collection, Möbius Continuum, in 2020. Her stories have appeared in English translation in the collections Book of Beijing (2023), Sinopticon (2021), The Way Spring Arrives (2021), Broken Stars (2019), Clarkesworld magazine, and Current Futures, XPRIZE’s science fiction ocean anthology (2019). Her stories have also been translated into Italian, Japanese, German, Romanian, and other languages.
Hannah Onoguwe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies Imagine Africa 500, from Pan African Publishers; Strange Lands Short Stories, from Flame Tree Press; and The Newlyweds’ Widow, from Mukana Press. Her work has appeared in publications including Adanna, The Drum Literary Magazine, Omenana, Brittle Paper, The Stockholm Review, and Timeworn Literary Journal. In 2014, Cupid’s Catapult, her collection of short stories, was one of ten manuscripts chosen to kick off the Nigerian Writers Series, an imprint of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). She is the winner of the ANA Bayelsa State Poetry Competition in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Ibadan and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Jos. She works at a software company, providing support for the Nigeria Immigration Service.
Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics at Framingham State University, and a transdisciplinary scholar of the climate crisis. She is the author of two short story collections, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2014) and the Philip K. Dick Award finalist Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018). Her recent work includes a chapbook of essays and stories, Utopias of the Third Kind (2022). Her academic work on a justice-centered, transdisciplinary conceptualization of the climate crisis has resulted in a book, Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice, forthcoming from Routledge in January 2024. Her short fiction has been widely published, including the short story “Widdam,” part of the interdisciplinary climate-themed collection A Year Without a Winter (2019). She was born and brought up in New Delhi, India, and now lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is the Perry World House Professor of Practice for Human Rights at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School. He is president and CEO of the International Peace Institute and served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014 to 2018. He served as Jordan’s Ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2010. In 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him as Advisor on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. In 2002, he was elected the first president of the Assembly of State Parties of the International Criminal Court, which he played a central role in establishing. He has extensive knowledge of peacekeeping, and served as a political affairs officer in UNPROFOR, in the former Yugoslavia, from 1994 to 1996. He holds a bachelor of arts from Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University.
Jason Anderson is a senior program director at ClimateWorks Foundation in San Francisco. He started working on climate and clean energy at the United States Department of Energy, after which he helped develop solar energy in Central America. He worked in Brussels at Climate Action Network Europe, the Institute for European Environmental Policy, and WWF, and was a lead author of two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special reports. He earned degrees at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Claire Armitstead is associate editor for culture at The Guardian, where she has worked since 1992. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. She edited the book Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City (2018). Before joining The Guardian, she worked as an editor and critic at the Financial Times and the Hampstead & Highgate Express. She was born in London and spent her early childhood in northern Nigeria.
Azucena Castro is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University, and a Visiting Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires. Her research connects environmental humanities with Latin American cultural studies. She has edited the book Multispecies Futures: Kin-Making Practices for Planetary Emergency (Bartlebooth, 2023).
Andrea Chapela is a Mexican author of a fantasy YA series, an essay collection, and two short story collections. She won several awards and fellowships in her country and in 2021 was chosen as one of Granta’s 25 Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. She lives in Mexico City with her cat.
Nalini Chhetri has been an academic at Arizona State University for almost 20 years. She teaches and works on themes of climate change, global development, and research design. Dr. Chhetri grew up in the Himalayan foothills but is now a resident of Sonoran Desert where she lives with her family.
Alejandra Espino del Castillo creates comics, illustrations and works on collective projects that give her the opportunity to share experiences with different artists and creators. Her work has been published in several anthologies both Mexican and international as well as self published projects.
Fabio Fernandes is a Brazilian writer, lecturer, and researcher currently based in São Paulo. He has published several books, including the novel Back in the USSR, the novella Under Pressure, and the collection Love: An Archaeology. He has translated several science fiction novels into Brazilian Portuguese, including William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. He coedited the anthologies We See a Different Frontier, with Djibril al-Ayad, and Solarpunk - Come ho imparato ad amare il futuro, with Francesco Verso. He teaches science fiction and politics as part of the journalism program at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, and is currently researching logistic utopias in the work of science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.
Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Edinburgh and Berlin. She has a background in astronomy and is particularly interested in writing both fiction and non-fiction about science. Most recently she co-edited (with Drs Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani) Uncanny Bodies, a specially commissioned anthology of fiction and essays responding to Freud’s uncanny. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in ArtReview, Tamarind, Times Literary Supplement, and Magma. She is an honorary fellow at STIS (Science, Technology and Innovation Studies) at the University of Edinburgh.
Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor and Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. She was President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) from 2011 to 2015. She has published widely on climate change and literature. Her most recent authored book is Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (2019) and she is the editor of anthologies such as The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate (with Kelly Sultzbach, 2022), Climate and Literature (2019), and Cli-fi: A Companion (with Axel Goodbody, 2018).
Joseph Kunkel, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, is a Principal at MASS Design Group, where he directs the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a community designer and educator focused on sustainable development practices throughout Indian Country. His work includes exemplary American Indian housing projects and processes nationwide. This research work has developed into emerging best practices, leading to an online Healthy Homes Road Map for Tribal housing development, funded by HUD’s PD&R Office. In 2019 Joseph was awarded an Obama Foundation Fellowship for his work with Indigenous communities. Joseph is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Civil Society Fellowship, a partnership of ADL and The Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Most recently, Joseph was named a 2022 Rubinger Community Fellow by the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC).
Ken Liu is a winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards and the author of the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
Manjana Milkoreit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo (Department of Sociology and Human Geography). Her research integrates global environmental governance and cognitive theory to study actor motivations, beliefs and agency, institutional effectiveness, and science-policy-society interactions related to climate change. Currently, she focusses on the role of future thinking (imagination) in sustainability transformations, the governance of Earth system tipping processes, and social tipping points.
Gabriela Damián Miravete is a Mexican author. Her stories have been translated into five languages and published in projects shortlisted for the Hugo and World Fantasy Award. With “They Will Dream in the Garden” she won the 2018 James Tiptree, Jr. Award (Otherwise). Her book They Will Dream in the Garden is out on December 5th, 2023 by Rosarium Press.
Martha Riva Palacio Obón is a Mexican author and sound artist. In 2020 she was granted de Otherwise Fellowship and in 2022 she became member of the SNCA. Among her published works are “Biography of Algae” (Strange Horizons), “Score for Fish Choir” (ANMLY), El mono infinito (UNAM) and Orfeo (FCE) among others.
Benjamin Ong is an ecologist, educator, science/nature writer, and development professional from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he co-founded the Urban Biodiversity Initiative (Ubi). He was an Applied Imagination Fellow 2021-2022 at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. His current PhD at the University of St Andrews explores reconciliation ecology, nature connection, and tropical urban interstices. An occasional poet and photographer, he received the 2019 Marsh Award for Education in Botanic Gardens.
Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor. She was co-editor of Anathema magazine and the co-founder of Omenana magazine. Her short stories have been featured in several magazines and anthologies, including the award-winning Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, and nominated for the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction. Ex Marginalia, her anthology of essays by writers of colour, is available now through Hydra House Books.
Anna Pigott writes and teaches about the climate crisis and social transformation, drawing on feminist, more-than-human, and political ecology perspectives. She is currently lecturer in Human Geography at Swansea University, UK, where her research/activism focuses on the roles of emotion and creativity in climate action, particularly in higher education settings.
Bailey Pyritz is the audio engineer at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. They recorded and edited Libia Brenda’s interview for The Climate Action Almanac, as well as wrote and recorded the theme music. Bailey graduates from ASU in May 2024 with a degree in Media Arts and Engineering, where they have gained skills in sound design, interactive programming, and more. Bailey is a musician and can be found under the name Kylo Gun, as well as with the band I Am Miss Havisham.
João Queiroz is a Brazilian artist born in the Amazonian state of Rondônia and is now based in Florianópolis. He graduated in Design with a focus on illustration and animation. His work combines elements of cyberpunk and solarpunk aesthetics with indigenous motifs and patterns, inspired by Brazil’s First Nations: the Kayapó, Tukanos, Barés, Guaranis, and all of the more than 300 Indigenous Peoples in the Brazilian territory. His unique work “Amazofuturismo” has gained international prominence with commissions from Facebook, Twitter, HP, Natura, Arizona State University, Extinction Rebellion, and an invitation to exhibit in the London Science Museum, among others.
Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Green Earth, 2312, and Aurora. His work has been translated into 25 languages. His most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, imagines a new transnational agency that advocates for the rights of future generations amidst escalating climate chaos, with a particular focus on radical technological interventions to address collapsing glaciers and other tipping-point phenomena, and on restructuring the world’s economic system with a new set of constraints and incentives. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995, and returned as part of their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Davis, California.
Nigel Topping served as a United Nations Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP26. In this role, he mobilized global private-sector and local-government institutions to take bold action on climate change, launching the Race To Zero and Race To Resilience campaigns and, with Mark Carney, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. He is now a global advisor to governments, financial institutions, and private companies on climate and industrial strategy. He is a non-executive director of the UK Infrastructure Bank, an Honorary Professor of Economics at Exeter University, and was awarded the honor of CMG in Queen Elizabeth’s final honors list in 2022. He serves as a senior climate advisor to FSD Africa and a member and business champion to the Climate Change Committee. From 2015 to 2020, he was the CEO of We Mean Business, an organization which drove collaboration across the business and policy community to accelerate action on climate change.
Emma Törzs is a writer, teacher, and occasional translator. Her fiction has been honored with an NEA fellowship in prose, a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize, and her debut novel, Ink Blood Sister Scribe, was an international bestseller, a Good Morning America book club pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of 2023. She teaches creative writing at Macalester College.
Iliana Vargas is a Mexican author. She studied Hispanic Literature in UNAM, and is the author of the books Joni Munn y otras alteraciones del psicosoma, Magnetofónica, Habitantes del aire caníbal y Yo no voy a salvarte. Some of his short stories have been translated from Spanish into English and Portuguese.
Laura Watts is an author, poet, ethnographer of futures, and Visiting Professor at Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research and writing explores how the energy and data future is imagined and made at the edge. Her last book, Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press), won the 4S Rachel Carson Prize and was Shortlisted for Saltire Research Book of the Year.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is an author, data scientist and tinkerer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Watchdog, a research collective for factchecking, investigative journalism, and community tech. His fiction includes the novels Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race, and The Salvage Crew. His stories have won the Gratiean award, been nominated for the Nebula and Independent Games Festival awards, and appeared in venues like Wired, Foreign Policy, and Slate. He spends most of his time on his earthbag homestead in Kandy.
Farhana Yamin is an internationally recognized lawyer and climate-justice activist. She runs the Climate Justice and Just Transition Donor Collective, which brings together some of the world’s largest climate philanthropies to create climate solutions that also tackle systemic inequalities. She coordinates the Climate Reframe Project, which seeks to amplify the voice of climate activists and experts from racialized minorities in the UK environmental movement. She trained as an outdoor education leader, focusing on nature connection, including how to support racialized minorities in accessing and enjoying green spaces. She is director of Impatience Ltd; an honorary fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University; a senior advisor to SYSTEMIQ; a FRSA and visiting professor at University of the Arts, London; and deputy chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum Expert Advisory Group. She was voted number two on the 2020 BBC Power List, with the judges describing her a “powerhouse of climate justice.”
Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and an associate professor in the university’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering and School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He also serves as the academic director of Future Tense, a partnership between ASU, New America and Slate magazine. Ed’s research and teaching explore the workings of imagination, digital culture, creative collaboration, and the intersection of the humanities, arts and sciences. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, 2017) and coeditor of Future Tense Fiction (Unnamed Press, 2019), Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017), and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (William Morrow, 2014), among other books. He completed his PhD in English and American Literature at Stanford University in 2011 and his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 2002. Before graduate school, Ed worked as a journalist at Time, Slate, and Popular Science.
Joey Eschrich is the managing editor at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU, Slate magazine, and New America on emerging technologies, culture, and society. He has coedited a number of books of fiction and nonfiction, including Cities of Light (2021), created in partnership with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory; A Year Without a Winter (2019), named one of the best Art Books of the Year by the New York Times, and Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities (2017), which was supported by a grant from NASA. From 2016 through 2022, he ran Arizona State University’s Everything Change global climate fiction contests with colleagues at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. He hosts CSI Skill Tree, a series of virtual conversations on how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds, and edits the Imaginary Papers newsletter on science fiction, futures thinking, and imagination.
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