Born in Buffalo, New York in 1950, John Kessel is the author of two solo novels, Good News from Outer Space (Tor, 1989) and Corrupting Dr. Nice (Tor, 1997), and one in collaboration with his alter ego James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach (Bluejay, 1985). He also has three collections of short fiction, Meeting in Infinity (Arkham House, 1992), The Pure Product (Tor, 1997), and most recently The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2008). His novella "Another Orphan" won the 1982 Nebula Award, his 1992 story "Buffalo" won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Locus Poll, and his novella "Stories for Men" shared the 2002 James Tiptree Jr. Award with M. John Harrison's novel Light. He has been nominated seven more times for the Nebula and four times for the Hugo. His dramatic version of "Faustfeathers" won the Paul Green Playwright's Prize in 1994, and his one-act "A Clean Escape" has been produced by the Allowance Theater in Raleigh, as an audio drama by the Seeing Ear Theater, and most recently as an episode of the ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction. With Mark Van Name and Richard Butner, he organized the Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference, which produced the anthology Intersections. With Jim Kelly, he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), both published by Tachyon Books.