Sandra McDonald served eight years as an officer in the United States Navy. Since then, people have paid her to be a Hollywood assistant, a teacher, and a bureaucrat. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Chizine, Talebones and more, including the current issue of Fantasy magazine and the newly published anthologies Twenty Epics and Best of the Rest. She was once short-listed for the Tiptree Award for a story about a transvestite ghost. Her first novel, a science fiction-military-romance called The Outback Stars, will be published by Tor in spring 2007, with a sequel to follow.

She holds a master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine, where she studied with the very fine writer and teacher James Patrick Kelly, and attended the Viable Paradise spec fic workshop in 2001. Visit her website at www.sandramcdonald.com.