Our Authors

Keegan Kuhn is the award-winning co-director of the highly acclaimed documentary film Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, executive produced for Netflix by Leonardo DiCaprio. Kuhn is the owner and operator of First Spark Media, a digital film production company tailored to creating films for social justice. Kuhn’s skills as a director, producer, cinematographer, editor, animator and composer have been utilized in film subjects as diverse as modern Alaskan homesteading, gender inequality, animal rescues, Buddhism, endurance sports and environmental destruction. He is motivated by a deep desire to shed light on untold stories of the most downtrodden in our society, and to raise awareness through greater visibility of social justice issues. Kuhn is the owner of the camera accessory company—First Spark Gear—and creator of the educational music project True Nature. He lives with his partner Shani in the East Bay of San Francisco, California.

James Anthony Kuhoric is known for his work writing licensed science fiction and horror comic books. He’s crafted tales for many fan-favorite series including “Battlestar Galactica,” “First Wave,” “Lexx,” “Army of Darkness” and “Stargate: SG-1.” To this day he maintains that next to his family, quality science fiction is his greatest love. People who know him best sometimes call him “Starbuck.”

AJ Kumar is a digital marketing expert dedicated to helping experts systematically build fame and authority through personality-driven media companies. As the founder of The Limitless Company, a social media agency, AJ specializes in establishing thought leaders as industry authorities. His journey began after connecting with mentor Neil Patel and honing his skills at a San Francisco–based digital marketing agency in 2010. AJ’s breakthrough came in 2012 when he transformed an author into a global industry–leading guru, achieving significant online traffic and revenue growth. He has also guided CEOs, reality TV stars, founders, and Fortune 500 companies. In 2020, AJ founded The Limitless Company to create a scalable system for guru brand building, positioning himself as the “Digital Maestro.” AJ and his team develop captivating content, distribute it across platforms, and optimize data-driven strategies to convert attention into revenue. AJ’s vision is to establish a network of talent powered by The Limitless Company, running it as a next-generation social media content studio that engages audiences and drives results. Through creativity and technology, AJ is redefining influence and fulfilling his American dream.

Robert Kurzban, Ph.D., is currently an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of psychology. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California Santa Barbara, and received postdoctoral training at Caltech, UCLA and the University of Arizona. His research focuses on evolved cognitive adaptations for navigating the social world in domains such as mate choice, friendship, morality and cooperation.

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s Web site KurzweilAI.net has more than 1 million readers. Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the National Medal of Technology and the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received 15 honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written five books, four of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into nine languages and was the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times bestseller and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Ray Kurzweil is a world-class inventor, thinker, and futurist with a 36-year track record of accurate predictions. A leader in artificial intelligence for 63 years, he was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software.

Ray has won a Grammy, the National Medal of Technology, a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and 21 honorary doctorates. He has written six bestselling books including The Singularity Is Near, How to Create a Mind, and The Singularity Is Nearer, which debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

He served as a director of engineering and later principal researcher and AI visionary at Google for 13 years where he developed an AI model that conversed in natural language with 100,000 books, a landmark precursor to today’s large language models.

Alisa Kwitney is the multi-published author of humorous women’s fiction and graphic novels, including Till the Fat Lady Sings, which the New York Times called “darkly humorous . . . imaginative and quirky.” Her work has been translated into German, Russian, Japanese, Norwegian, and Indonesian. As Alisa Sheckley, she has written two paranormal romances, The Better to Hold You and Moonburn. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program and the recipient of a scholarship of merit, Alisa was an editor at Vertigo/DC Comics for seven years and has taught a course in graphic novel writing at Fordham University.

Viscountess Mercedes Lackey-Edgerton-Smythe has had a rose, a dahlia and a tulip named for her. A neck-or-nothing rider, she was the first ever female to be named Master of the Derbyshire Hunt. She raises peafowl and swans and is a notable expert on 11th-century incunabula. And if you believe any of this, perhaps your copy of Burke’s Peerage is not what it should be. She is the author of several fantasy series, including the Elemental Masters series in which this story is set.

Mur Lafferty has a varied past dabbling in many forms of media. She worked in the gaming and Internet industries for nine years, from Red Storm Entertainment to writing freelance for RPGs including Warcraft: The RPG, Mage and Exalted. She has written for the magazines PC Gamer, Scrye, Knights of the Dinner Table, Anime Insider and Inquest. Mur has been a podcast producer since 2004, hosting the popular shows “Geek Fu Action Grip” and “I Should Be Writing,” as well as aiding other podcasters in their sound engineering (including Senator John Edwards’ “One America Committee” podcast). Mur is the co-author of Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, a “right brain” approach to the art of podcasting. She lives in Durham, N.C., with her husband, her daughter and a little brown dog.