Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning novelist, game designer, computer game designer, podcaster, screenwriter, and graphic novelist. He’s had more than forty-five novels published, the best known of those being the New York Times bestselling Star Wars books I, Jedi and Rogue Squadron. He has an asteroid named after him and, since undertaking to write Vol’jin: Shadows of the Horde, spends a lot of his spare time "leveling up!"