Point of Hopes: A Novel of Astreiant

Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than thirty original science fiction and fantasy novels, most with queer themes and characters, as well as authorized tie-ins for Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Star Wars Rebels. She won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, Point of Dreams (written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett), and Death By Silver, with Amy Griswold. She also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man, Fairs' Point, Death By Silver, and for the short story "The Rocky Side of the Sky" (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She was also shortlisted for the Otherwise (Tiptree) Award. Her latest short story, "Sirens," appeared in the collection Retellings of the Inland Seas, and her text-based game for Choice of Games, A Player's Heart, came out in 2020. Her most recent solo novel, Water Horse, was published in June 2021. Her next solo novel, The Master of Samar, will be out in 2023.

Lisa A. Barnett was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, attended Girls' Latin School, and received her BA from the University of Massachusetts/Boston. She began working in theatre publishing while she was still in college, beginning at Baker's Plays in Boston, and then moving to Heinemann, where she developed her own line of theatre books. In that role, she edited plays, monologue collections, and books of practical theatre, as well as a second line of books on theatre in education, which included a string of award-winning titles. As a writer, she worked primarily in collaboration with her partner, Melissa Scott, and together they produced three novels: The Armor of Light, set in an alternate Elizabethan England, Point of Hopes, and Point of Dreams, the last a Lambda Literary Award Winner. They also produced a short story, "The Carmen Miranda Gambit," which was published in the 1990 collection Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three. Outside of the collaboration, she had a pair of monologues published in the collection Monologues from the Road, and subsequently saw them produced as part of an evening of "theatre from the road." She was exceedingly fond of both dogs and horses, and was an active member of the Piscataqua Obedience Club as well as being heavily involved in several equine rescue organizations. She was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer in 2003, and died of a metastatic brain tumor in 2006.