Susan M. Bernardo is professor of English at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York. She teaches courses in Victorian literature, gothic and detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales. She has published articles on George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Tim Burton, and C.J. Cherryh. She has also co-edited Gender Reconstructions: Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture and contributed an entry on Abandoned or Murdered Children to Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. Her other research interests include Oscar Wilde's essays and fiction, and Anne Thackeray's stories.Graham J. Murphy is adjunct faculty at Trent University (Peterborough, ON) and Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology (Toronto, ON). He teaches courses in science fiction, utopian fiction, and general survey courses in English Literature. He has published articles on William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Melissa Scott, Robert Charles Wilson, and Greg Egan in such sources as Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, and Extrapolation. By an odd twist of fate he also co-edited The Irish in Popular Literature of the Early American Republic: Paddy Whacking. He was the 2005 Chair of the Philip K. Dick Award.

As part of a series on popular and critically-acclaimed authors selected by high school teachers and librarians, this volume features the works of Portland, Oregon-based writer Ursula Le Guin. The brief biography of her upbringing by noted anthropologists helps explain why Le Guin considers her writing to transcend science fiction/fantasy. Bernardo and Murphy offer readings of a dozen of her works from The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) to Tales from Eathsea (2001), a list of her many awards, and a recent e-mail interview.