Our Authors

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.

Raised in Maryland, Paul Lake earned his undergraduate degree at Towson University and taught for two years at a Baltimore school. After receiving the Mirrielees Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, he earned his master’s degree in creative writing and English at Stanford University. Lake taught at University of Santa Clara in California for two years before moving to Arkansas to teach at Arkansas Teach University, where he is currently a professor of English and creative writing. In 1988, he won the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, an annual prize given to one Arkansas writer each year, and now he is the poetry editor of First Things, a journal on current issues. He has two published books of poetry, Another Kind of Travel (Chicago) and Walking Backward (Story Line), and one previously published novel, Among the Immorals, a satirical thriller about poets and vampires in San Francisco. He lives in Russellville, Ark., with his wife Tina and their two children.

Eli Lake is a senior reporter for the New York Sun. Before that he was the chief diplomatic correspondent for United Press International. Mr. Lake’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, the Weekly Standard, the National Review and the Washington Times. In his reporting he has traveled to all five continents and all three members of the Axis of Evil. In 2005 and 2006, Mr. Lake lived and reported for a year from Cairo for the New York Sun.