Cirrus@Austlit

Alisa Krasnostein is the editor and publisher at Twelfth Planet Press. She is also executive director and editor at the review website Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus and a member of the Galactic Suburbia Podcast team. In her spare time, she is a critic, reader, reviewer, runner, environmentalist, knitter, quilter, and puppy lover.

Although Krasnostein's interest in science fiction began in her early childhood, her initial entry into the publishing industry was as a freelance non-fiction writer and editor in the early 2000s. Sometime around 2003/2004, however, she encountered the independent science-fiction press through a friend whose first short stories were starting to get published in some local magazines. With her interest piqued, Krasnostein joined Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM) as a slush reader and later became a member of the ASIM Collective.

Only a few years after beginning her involvement in independent publishing, Krasnostein established Twelfth Planet Press. In a 2010 interview with Charles Tan, she records that, having learned a good deal about the behind-the-scenes operations of a magazine, she decided she'd like to try doing it herself. She chose the name in response to the then current debate regarding the reclassification of several planetoids as planets.

Twelfth Planet's first publication, the e-zine New Ceres, went online in September 2006, and the following year, Krasnostein experimented with the free young adult e-zine Shiny. In 2008, the press published its first print book, the anthology 2012 and also converted New Ceres into a print magazine. Since then, Twelfth Planet titles have won or been shortlisted for several prestigious awards, including the Aurealis, Ditmar, Washington Science Fiction, and British Fantasy awards.