Samuel R. Delany is a renowned novelist and critic, whose award-winning fiction includes Dhalgren (1975), Babel-17 (1966), The Mad Man (1994), Dark Reflections (2007), and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). In addition to receiving the William Whitehead Memorial Award and the Kessler Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing, Delany was chosen by the Lambda Book Report in 1988 as one of the fifty most influential people of the past hundred years to change our conception of queerness. After more than thirty years of teaching, first at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and later at Temple University, where he served as Director of the Graduate… Creative Writing Program, Samuel Delany now lives with his partner in Philadelphia.
Kathy Acker was a novelist, essayist and performance artist whose books include Blood and Guts in High School, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Empire of the Senseless, In Memoriam to Identity, Don Quixote, My Mother: Demonology, and her last novel, Pussy King of the Pirates. Born and raised on New York's Upper East Side, she died of breast cancer in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1997.