The Authors Quill Illustrators Karah Richardson Authors Mike Strickland

Karah Richardson was born in 2007, spending much of her childhood moving to and exploring new states across America. She met a variety of people though having prosopagnosia (face blindness) made recognizing them a challenge. Karah loves challenges. Growing up, she had a fascination with studying faces, assuming that she could “learn” how to memorize family and friends by drawing them over and over. This led to a lifelong love of art. She’d blend together a wide variety of separate features and piece them together like a puzzle, relying on others to tell her if it looks “correct.” Due to such an early start on such a potent hobby in her life, she quickly discovered many teachers, family, and friends wanted to encourage her to cultivate this study into a real-life applicable skill. They helped her branch out beyond her comfort zone of faces into just about anything, allowing her to combine this new joy in art with her deep appreciation for stories. The Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contests are the most prestigious writing and illustrating competitions in the world with the Writers of the Future being in its 43rd year, the Illustrators of the Future in its 38th year and they are judged by the premier names in speculative fiction. Mike Strickland has made a career out of writing everything from marketing copy and finance articles to technical documentation and mobile app messages—and even twenty thousand science fiction-themed trivia questions. Other jobs he's been paid to do include scuba diver, navigator, call center representative, user experience designer, and now, science fiction author. His love of words began with fantasy and sci-fi, where it has now brought him full circle. After a long hiatus from fiction, Mike started writing and publishing again in 2024. A year later, he earned a master's degree in creative writing and won the prestigious Writers of the Future Contest. Mike currently lives and writes in a Denver, Colorado suburb, but other places he’s called home include San Diego, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, Japan, Honduras, an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, and even a 1973 Volkswagen Squareback. He's not sure if this itinerant lifestyle emerged from his love of travel or vice versa, but his wanderings have undeniably inspired his writing. The story idea for “As Long as You Both Shall Live” was born from a dream two days before the Writers of the Future contest deadline. Mike wrote most of the story on the day of the deadline itself—his most prolific day of writing yet. The inspiration that powered such output focused on this question: “If technology allowed a person’s consciousness to be transferred to a virtual environment, disconnected from their physical body, what would happen if that person’s body died while their consciousness was in that state?” Mike explores the ethical questions inherent in this premise through the context of a hopeful love story—as all the best stories are told.