John Jennings is a professor, author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and winner of the Hugo Award for his co-adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian novel The Parable of the Sower.

As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is also the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric.

Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. Jennings also created Marvel’s new Afro-Caribbean cosmic superhero Ghost Light with artist Valentine Delandro.

Dr. Lisa Yaszek is Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, where she explores science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures. Her award-winning books include Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008); Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, and The Future is Female! Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women series (2018-present).

Yaszek’s ideas about science fiction as a window to cultural history have been featured in venues including The Washington Post, Food and Wine Magazine, and USA Today, and she has been an expert commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, the BBC4, Turner Classic Movies, and the AMC miniseries James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction.

A founding member of the Eugie Award for Short Speculative Fiction, Yaszek is also past president of the Science Fiction Research Association and recipient of the 2024 SFRA Lifetime Achievement Award.