Round Robin exercise manuscript led by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany Jr., also known as Chip, was born on April 1st, 1942 in New York to Margaret Cary Boyd and Samuel Ray Delany, Sr. During his youth, Delany attended the Vassar Summer Institute for Gifted Children before attending the Bronx High School of Science, where he met his future wife, Marilyn Hacker. Delany and Hacker were married in 1961.

With help from Hacker's connections as an editor at Ace Books, Delany published a cut verison of his first novel The Jewels of Aptor in January 1962. The story would eventually be republished in its entirety in 1968. During this six year period, Delany went on to publish The Fall of the Towers series (1963-1965), The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Babel-17 (1966), Empire Star, The Einstein Intersection (1967), and Nova (1968). Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection would both win Nebula awards. Delany also won Nebula awards in short fiction for "Aye, and Gomorrah" (1967) and "Time Considered as Helix of Semi-Precious Stone" (1968), a Hugo award winner as well.

In the following years, Delany began to work within erotic literature with Equinox and Hogg, later published in 1995. Delany also published the acclaimed and divisive Dhalgren (1975) followed by Trouble on Triton (1976), Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and the Return to Nevèrÿon series (1979-1987). During this time, Delany and Hacker had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, in 1974. Nonexclusive and at times separated, Hacker and Delany would officially divorce in 1980. Much of the relationship between Delany, an openly gay man, and Hacker, out as a lesbian since 1980, is detailed out in The Motion of Light in Water, Delany's autobiography about growing up as a gay African American man. Delany would also write about his current partnership with Dennis Rickett in Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999).

Delany was honored with the Kessler Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in 1997 and later received the Stonewall Book Award for Dark Reflections (2007). Delany also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2021. Over the course of his career, Delany published 21 novels, along with several anthologies of short fiction and non-fiction books, and won four Nebula awards, two Hugo awards, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Delany also wrote within the field of science fiction critique and held several academic positions at various institutions, including the State University of New York, University of Wisconsin, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Wesleyan University, University of Michigan, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, University of Kansas, and Temple University.