Star Trek: Picard-Stargazer

Mike Johnson, fiction writer and poet, is widely regarded as one of New Zealand's most innovative writers. He lives on Waiheke Island and has taught creative writing at AUT University and the University of Auckland. In 2002 he received The University of Auckland's Literary Fellowship, having been Literary Fellow at Canterbury University in 1987. His first novel, Lear, the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon was short listed for the New Zealand Book Awards in 1986, his novel Dumb Show won the Buckland Memorial Award for Literary Excellence in 1995, and he won the Frances Kean Award his short story, 'Magic Strings' in 1999. His first book of poetry, The Palanquin Ropes, (1983) was co-winner of the John Cowie Reed Memorial Competition. His non-fiction, Angel of Compassion, was shortlisted for the Ashton Whyle Award in 2014, and a poem from Vertical Harp, The selected poems of Li He (2006) has been anthologised in the Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (Random House, 2015). Mike Johnson is the author of twenty-six books including nine books of poetry, three of shorter fiction, one non fiction, three children's books, and ten novels.

Kirsten Beyer was a cocreator of the acclaimed hit Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard, where she served as writer and supervising producer for season one and a coexecutive producer for season two. She has also written and produced Star Trek: Discovery and is currently a coexecutive producer on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the last ten Star Trek: Voyager novels, including 2020's To Lose the Earth, for which she was the narrator of the audiobook edition. She contributed the short story "Isabo's Shirt" to Star Trek: Voyager: Distant Shores Anthology. In 2006, Kirsten appeared at Hollywood's Unknown Theater in their productions of Johnson Over Jordan, This Old Planet, and Harold Pinter's The Hothouse, which the Los Angeles Times called "unmissable." She lives in Los Angeles.