Vanessa Lopez Aziz spent the first ten years of her adulthood adventuring. She’s lived up and down the California coast, Nevada, the Alaskan frontier, England, and Eastern Europe. She’s jumped off mountains, gone swimming with whale sharks, and excavated 15,000-year-old archaeological sites. She is more often found writing about adventures than living them these days.
She is first-generation half-Filipino and half-Pakistani. She always felt a lack of representation in media growing up, so now she writes the kind of novels she wishes to see more of. Her stories are populated with quirky protagonists finding their way in the world when traditional labels don’t fit. Her debut YA time travel novel Play it Back is inhabited by such characters. When she’s not writing, she works as a nurse in child psychiatry. She and her husband Tomas are raising two bright young children, Lincoln and Luna, in Las Vegas, NV.
Warrior, Monk, and Scholar.
Seb Cielens is a South Australian writer and teacher who has immersed himself in Asian culture and history since he was a child. His stories recount the turmoil of life in late imperial Korea and China, weaving hundreds of hours of historical research into vivid and inspiring fictional tales. After training in Chinese, Japanese and Korean martial arts for much of his life, Seb began putting it together with his passion for writing.
Seb holds a Master of Arts in Writing and Literature and a Bachelor of Education. White Lotus is his first novel, with The Golden Drum and Three Thousand Realms coming soon to complete The Tripitaka Chronicles.