Heather McDougal is a writer, educator, and graphic designer who lives in Northern California, where she was born. Heather grew up in a rural summer crafts school, where people from all over the world came to make things. As a result she received in-depth training in pottery, weaving, cooking, construction, and how to grow things. She has worked in the fashion industry as a designer and pattern maker, and holds an MFA in sculpture. She knows how to blow glass and weld. She has a long-standing fascination with automata and clockwork, particularly those of the 18^th century. Her blog, Cabinet of Wonders, was a popular meditation on wonder, science, and magic, and can now be read on this website.

Heather has been awarded a writing residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, is an alumna of Viable Paradise and Writers of the Future, and is Art Director at Strange Horizons magazine.  She’s had stories published in Apex, Pseudopod, Writers of the Future, and a number of anthologies.  Her novel, Songs for a Machine Age, was published by Hadley Rille Books in 2012.  Her near-future biopunk novel, Biomancers, about Eminent Domain escapees living in the backwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains and fighting Big Pharma, is in its final edits.

She has a fledgeling company called The Magic Pavilion Tent Company, making exotic tents (still in the prototype stages at the moment) and is working on starting a Cabinet of Wonders podcast with her teenage kid, Nutmeg.