Welcome to round two of our 2015 ArtWorks Festival authors.

This week: sci-fi, fantasy and mystery. Readers and aspiring writers will have plenty to keep them busy at the Author Stage this year, as each writer’s story calls to mind that old saying about the truth being stranger than fiction.

Raised in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, William Kent Kruger briefly attended Stanford University and logged timber before publishing the first in his New York Times bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series.

Set in the great north woods of Minnesota, the series follows former sheriff Corcoran O’Connor — a man of mixed heritage, being part Irish-American and part Ojibwe — through a fictional county called Tamarack. Kent’s 2013 novel “Ordinary Grace” was honored with a series of four awards known in the mystery writing business as “the full EBAM.”

Kruger won’t be the only author whose work has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Our own Amanda Hocking returns to the festival this year. The Austin native got her start via self-publishing in 2010 before signing with St. Martin’s Griffin.

Hocking is something of a prolific writer. In just five years, she’s published 17 novels, and is currently at work on another. She’s best known for her young adult paranormal series, the Kanin Chronicles, and her love of the paranormal along with Red Bull, Batman, and Jim Henson, continues to inspire her writing.

Another self-published author joins the ranks this year, as Jules Hancock, whose sci-fi/fantasy novel, “Realm’s End,” followed her around half-finished and in two large boxes before the writer decided to finish what she’d started — takes the stage at 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 22. Hancock moved to Austin “to be able to live and write in a quiet community,” and the move must have been a good one, as she is currently at work on her second book of this series and the first book of a companion series.

For the full schedule of authors, look no further than our website: austinareaarts.org/authors.

See you next week. Watch out for that Canadian air in the meantime.