Theo Tiffney
I grew up in a house full of books and science, two passions that I’ve balanced throughout my career. As someone who works at the intersection of science and society, I believe the fantastical stories we tell ourselves about other worlds are vital to laying the groundwork for how we want to resolve the monumental challenges we face in our own world.
While science writing has been my bread and butter, fiction writing and editing remains a passion for me, the way I kept myself sane throughout graduate school (and fed sometimes, as grad student stipends have never been generous). I specialize in queer speculative fiction, the weirder and more self-indulgent, the better. Just like science, writing is a social endeavor. My favorite part of working in fiction is digging into the guts of a manuscript to see how we tweak things to most effectively tell the story the author fell in love with writing.
Ann Kottner
I’ve been in love with books for so long that I don’t remember learning how to read. Much as I loved biology too, labwork cut into my reading time, so I switched to English as an undergrad and came out with a B.A. in English with a minor in biology. When I went for my M.A. in English, it had a distinctly medieval flavor and I aspired to being a medievalist with a history Ph.D. Coming to my senses just in time, I took the degrees I had and turned them into 30 years of experience as an editor, writer-for-hire, and layout designer. Along the way, I taught writing, grammar, and research methods at various NYC colleges for over a decade. I’ve been working with page layout and design programs since their earliest days. I remember green CRT text and the glowing C://> prompt, in the Before Windows times.
In my dilettante career, I’ve worked with advertising agencies, legal publishers, social policy researchers, environmental scientists, physicists, life coaches, urban planners, and academics, editing, writing, and designing publications. As a result, I’ve written professionally about labor organizing, education, gender issues, and wildly varied science-for-non-scientists topics. I’m comfortable editing academic writing, fiction, and creative non-fiction. But not poetry. Nope. I have Opinions about poetry. And Oxford commas.
In addition to non-fiction essays, articles, and reports, I’ve published both poetry and fiction. For the last 25 years, I’ve also been an active participant in several long-running writers’ groups, beta reading and sometimes editing everything from literary fiction to speculative fiction and fantasy and erotica. But not poetry. Nope. Opinions.
Otherwise, I’ll have a look at just about anything. I’m not proud. Or easily embarrassed.
My side gigs include an artists book imprint called Maelstrom House that has produced several small editions of hand-bound books of poetry and short fiction, including Stories from the Ruins: Poems about 9/11, which is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I also dabble in various paper arts, and admit to being a fanfic writer for mumblemumble years. We will say nothing of my obsessive love of fonts, typography, calligraphy, and manuscript illumination.
A long time blogger on Typepad, I’ve now moved to Substack, where new projects are brewing. I recently closed my Meta and X accounts (ask me why, go on), but you can still find me being an antifascist, unionist, feminist, exvangelical science nerd and politically agitating FDR Progressive crone with a mouth like a sailor on BlueSky.
Top banner photo © 2025 Theo Tiffney; AK banner and bio photo © 2025 Ann Kottner.
Nose to Tail Editorial 