Nicky Drayden is a systems analyst, and when she’s not debugging code, she’s detangling plot lines and mixing metaphors. Her debut novel, The Prey of Gods (Harper Voyager), featured in The New York Times Best of New Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Wall Street Journal’s Summer Reading: One Expert, One Book. Drayden’s sophomore novel, Temper, is touted as an exciting blend of Afrofuturism and New Weird. Her travels to South Africa as a college student influenced both of these works, and she enjoys blurring the genre lines between mythology, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and dark humor.

Drayden learned to write novels the old fashioned way, by banging out a crappy draft during the month of November with thousands of other aspiring novelists. In between novels, she frequently dabbles in short fiction, with over 30 stories in publications such as Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, and Space and Time Magazine.

During her stint as managing editor for The Drabblecast, she helped continue the speculative fiction podcast’s tradition of bringing strange stories to strange listeners. Once a year, she’d escape the slush trenches to work on “Women and Aliens Month” a special series featuring alien stories written by luminaries such as Lauren Beukes, Nnedi Okorafor, and Alaya Dawn Johnson.

Nicky Drayden lives and writes in Austin, Texas where being weird is highly encouraged, if not required.