Sheree Renée Thomas is a NAACP Image Award Nominee and a New York Times-bestselling, award-winning editor, poet, and the author of three short fiction and multigenre collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016, Publishers’ Weekly Starred Review), Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011), and Marvel's Black Panther: Panther's Rage novel (Titan Books, October 11, 2022). Her work is inspired by music, mythology, natural science, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. She is the editor of the groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000, Warner Aspect/Hachette) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004, Warner Aspect/Hachette), the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction, which earned the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards for Year's Best Anthology, making her also the first Black author to win the award since its inception in 1975.

Sheree is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also edited for Random House and for magazines like Apex, Strange Horizons, and is the Associate Editor of the historic Black Arts Movement literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 by Alvin Aubert. As a fiction writer and poet, her work has been supported with fellowships and residencies from Smith College as the Lucille Geier-Lakes Writer-in-Residence, the Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of Arts, VCCA, the Wallace Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, ArtsMemphis, and others. Widely anthologized, her work also appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Anne and Jeff VanderMeer, in several volumes of the Year’s Best anthologies, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, the Rhysling Awards, the Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, volume 1, and in The New York Times. Sheree was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre and served as a Special Guest and a co-host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony in Washington, DC with Andrea Hairston. Thomas also co-curated Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Afrofuturism Festival and served as a narrative writer and consultant on Sony PlayStation and Daimler AG/Mercedes Benz’s futurist video game, Dreams: Imagine Futures whose characters, Eshe, and the AI, Kody are based on her work.

A 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, 2022 World Fantasy Award Finalist, 2022 Ember Award Finalist, 2022 Locus Award Finalist, Ignyte Award Finalist, she is the winner of the 2022 Darrell Award for Year’s Best Novelette (“Madame & the Map: A Journey in Five Movements’ in Nine Bar Blues) and the Dal Colger Memorial Hall of Fame Award. Sheree is a collaborator with Janelle Monáe on "Timebox Altar(ed)" in the New York Times bestselling collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (Harper Voyager, April 18, 2022), and a co-editor of Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight (Tordotcom, November 15, 2022) and Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue with Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins (Third Man Books, January 18, 2022).

JANELLE MONÁE is widely celebrated as an American singer/songwriter, actress, producer, fashion icon, and futurist whose globally successful career spans over a decade. With her highly theatrical and stylized concept albums, she has garnered eight Grammy nominations and has developed her own label imprint, Wondaland Arts Society. Monáe has also earned great success as an actor, starring in critically acclaimed films including Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Harriet, The Glorias, and the 2020 horror film Antebellum. She will star in the highly anticipated sequel Knives Out 2. The Memory Librarian is her debut book.