A former neuroscientist, Astounding Award-nomainated and Judith A. Markowitz Award-winning author Naseem Jamnia’s (they/them) debut novella, The Bruising of Qilwa, was a finalist for the Crawford, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Their middle grade horror debut, Sleepaway, will be released in 2025 from Aladdin. Their nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, The Rumpus, The Writer's Chronicle, and other venues. They were a Bitch Media Fellow in Technology, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction, an Otherwise Fellow, and the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow. In addition to co-writing the academic text Positive Interactions with At-Risk Children (Routledge, 2019), their work has been included in the Lambda Literary EMERGE anthology (2020), We Made Uranium! And Other True Stories from the University of Chicago’s Extraordinary Scavenger Hunt (University of Chicago, 2019), and The White Guy Dies First (Tor Teen, 2024). Naseem is also the managing editor and book designer at Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny independent publishing house of inclusive feminist speculative writing. A Persian-Chicagoan and child to Iranian immigrants, Naseem now lives outside Reno, NV, with their husband and four furred creatures. Find out more and join their newsletter at www.naseemwrites.com or on Instagram @jamsternazzy.