Guests
Guest of Honor ~ Kaaron Warren
Kaaron Warren lives in Canberra, Australia, a city full of roundabouts, archives, restaurants, poetry slams and a large lake that may or may not house a monster.
Her most recent novel is The Grief Hole
(IFWG Publishing Australia), the story of a woman who knows how you’ll die by the ghosts that haunt you. The book is the first to win all three of the Australian genre awards: the Aurealis Award, the Ditmar Award and the Australian Shadows.
She also published three novels with Angry Robot Books. Slights
, Mistification
and Walking the Tree
, three very different books set in very different places.Slights
tells the story of a female serial killer who is obsessed with what she sees in the afterlife. This novel won a number of awards, including the Ditmar and the Shadows Award.
Kaaron has seven short story collections. Her most recent is Cemetery Dance Selects: Kaaron Warren
, which brings together five stories from her career, beginning with her second story in print The Blue Stream. Through Splintered Walls
, her themed collection from Twelfth Planet Press, saw a Shirley Jackson Award and World Fantasy Award shortlisting for the novella Sky
.
She has stories upcoming in Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatter’s and March Hares
, Looming Low
from Dim Shores, Nate Pederson’s Sisterhood
, Cemetery Dance’s Dark Screams series, and Bitter
, a novella, from Cemetery Dance.
Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. In 2018 she will be Established Artist in Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard House in Western Australia. She’s taught workshops in haunted asylums, old morgues and second hand clothing shops and she’s mentored lots of good writers through a number of programs.
Kaaron works two days a week in a second hand bric a brac shop, which provides her with endless ideas for stories. She’s lived in Fiji as part of the diplomatic corps. Lots of stories came out of that, including her novel Walking the Tree
. She hasn’t written the story inspired by the grave of the last cannibal, Udre Udre yet but she will. She lives with her husband, two children and two cats and loves collecting weird tables and beautiful glassware. Her idea of fun is a dinner party with friends, wine and good food.
Guest of Honor ~ Scott Edelman
Scott Edelman began his career in the fantastic as an assistant editor for Marvel Comics in the ’ 70s, where Stan Lee gave him the nickname Sparkling
,and in addition to comic books wrote everything from display copy for superhero Slurpee cups to the famous Bullpens Bulletins pages. While there, he edited the Marvel-produced fan magazine FOOM (Friend of Ol ’ Marvel). He also wrote trade paperbacks such as The Captain Midnight Action Book of Sports, Health and Nutrition and The Mighty Marvel Fun Book.
In 1976, he left staff to go freelance, and worked for both Marvel and DC. His scripts appeared in Captain Marvel, Superman Family, Master of Kung Fu, Omega the Unknown, Time Warp, House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, Welcome Back, Kotter and others.
He has published more than 85 short stories in magazines such as Analog, Postscripts, The Twilight Zone, Absolute Magnitude, The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, Science Fiction Review and Fantasy Book, and in anthologies such as Why New Yorkers Smoke, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, Crossroads: Southern Tales of the Fantastic, Men Writing SF as Women, MetaHorror, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars Probes, Forbidden Planets, Summer Chills, and The Mammoth Book of Monsters.
A collection of his horror fiction, These Words Are Haunted, came out in hardcover from Wildside Books in 2001, and was rereleased in 2015 in paperback by Fantastic Books. His collection of zombie fiction, What Will Come After, came in 2010 from PS Publishing, and was a finalist for both the Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award. His science fiction short fiction has been collected in What We Still Talk About from Fantastic Books. A new collection of zombie novelettes, Liars, Fakers, and the Dead Who Eat Them, was published earlier this year by Written Backward Press. He is also the author of the Lambda Award-nominated novel The Gift (Space & Time, 1990). He has been a Stoker Award finalist seven times, both in the category of Short Story and Long Fiction, and currently holds the record for the most Stoker Award nominations without a win. Additionally, Edelman worked for the Syfy Channel for more than thirteen years as editor of Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, and Blastr. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run. He also edited SCI FI magazine, previously known as Sci-Fi Entertainment, for more a decade, as well as two other SF media magazines, Sci-Fi Universe and Sci-Fi Flix. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.
He has at various times served on the juries for both the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Short Fiction Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has been the Editor in Residence at the Clarion SF Workshop in 1999 and 2003, and the Guest Editor at the Odyssey Writers Workshop in 1999. He was the Toastmaster for the 2000 Nebula Awards ceremony. He was the winner of the 2004 Sam Moskowitz Award for outstanding contributions to the field of science fiction fandom.
Artist Guest of Honor ~ Tom Kidd
Although a scatterbrain as a child, Tom Kidd was a magic copying machine. Once he looked at something he could draw it accurately, but he was quick to notice that machines could do just as good a job as he could. Even though he had offers to do portraits, he set about making things up to draw instead - no camera could do that, and making things up was more fun anyway. Later with role models like Chesley Bonestell and Norman Rockwell to guide him he worked towards his goal of being a fantasy illustrator. This led to a scholarship to Syracuse University, but he dropped out after two years, and eventually moved to New York City. His simple plan: sink or swim. After some gasping and flailing in the muck of the big city he got the hang of it and begin treading water.
Tom Kidd has worked for a number of publishers: Baen Books, Random House, DAW Books, Warner Books, Doubleday, Ballantine Books, Marvel Comics and Tor Books. He has illustrated two books: The Three Musketeers
(1998 - William Morrow) and The War of the Worlds
(2001 - Harper Collins), and there are two books of his art: The Tom Kidd Sketchbook
(1990 — Tundra) and Kiddography: The Art & Life of Tom Kidd
(2006 — Paper Tiger). A gallery featuring this book just appeared in the April ’ 06 issue of Realms of Fantasy.
His art has won him a World Fantasy Award (Best Artist 2004) and seven Chesley Awards.
Kidd has also done design work for film, theme parks, entertainment products, and all types of conceptual design work for such clients as Walt Disney, Rhythm & Hues and Universal Studios. His work has been displayed in a wide array of venues, including The Delaware Art Museum, The Society of Illustrators and the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame.
His favorite and most time-consuming obsession is a unpublished book called "Gnemo: Airships, Adventure, Exploration." This is the sort of stuff that makes him happy.
Guest of Honor ~ Michael J. Walsh
Michael J. Walsh is a fan, publisher, and bookseller, and has attended every World Fantasy Convention. He chaired the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore (1995), in DC (2003), and co-chaired with Peggy Rae Sapienza in DC (Alexandria, VA) in 2014.
As a small press publisher, Old Earth Books, he has republished Pavane as well as Clifford Simak and many others including two Howard Waldrop collections. These collections won him the World Fantasy Convention Special Non-Pro Award in 2009.
He is often found working in the Dealer's Room. You'll also find him in a corner chatting with other people who love to talk about books, publishing, history, conventions, and all the other things that come up.
Special Guest ~ Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction.
Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, featuring witches, alchemists, Fallen angels, dragons in human shape and magical and political intrigues: it comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace/Gollancz).
She also published The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a book set in a Galactic Empire based on Vietnamese culture, which follows four characters in search of the titular citadel, a marvel of technology which mysteriously vanished on the eve of a war. Previous works are the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood, a trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies featuring priest-cum-investigator Acatl (starting with Servant of the Underworld), and On a Red Station, Drifting (shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards), a space opera focusing on the stormy relationship between two women aboard a decaying space station.
Her short stories are frequently set in the Xuya universe, an alternate history continuity where the Mexica (Aztec) and Asian cultures have reached space ahead of the West, and where the familial structures include mindships, artificial intelligences incubated in human wombs. Such short fiction has appeared in a variety of professional magazines and anthologies.
Aliette has won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and three British Science Fiction Association Awards.
She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place. In what little is left of her spare time, she wrangles a small toddler and cooks Franco-Vietnamese food. Hobbies include board games, tai chi/chi gong, and devouring books.
Toastmaster ~ Linda D. Addison
Linda is the second oldest of ten children and grew up in Philadelphia where she graduated from Germantown High School. Her childhood memories include evenings listening to her mother tell stories she created using the children as characters or watching scary movies with her mother at night.
From the first moment she held a book in her hands in kindergarten Ms. Addison knew she wanted to make one of her own. She even now finds cruising a bookstore is as relaxing as drinking a fine glass of wine.
She graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a B.S. in Mathematics and currently lives in Arizona.
Linda is a founding member of a writing group, Circles In The Hair (CITH) which started meeting in 1990. She is poetry editor for Space & Time magazine. Her work has made frequent appearances over the years on the honorable mention list for Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant) and Year’s Best Science-Fiction (edited by Gardner Dozois).
In 2001, Addison was the first African-American to win the HWA’s Bram Stoker Award(R) for superior achievement in poetry for Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (Space & Time Books). She has received three additional awards for her collections: The Four Elements written with Marge Simon, Rain Graves and Charlee Jacob (2013 Bad Moon Books); How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend short stories and poetry collection (2011 Necon E-Books); and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (2007 Space & Time Books). Dark Duet (Necon E-Books), a collaborative book of poetry written with Stephen M. Wilson was a 2012 HWA Bram Stoker finalist. Other prominent recipients of this distinguished award include authors, Alice Sebold (Lovely Bones) and J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter Series).
Her collection, Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes, was also nominated for the Black Writers Alliance Gold Pen Award. Selected poems are on the Honorable Mention list for Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and were nominated for a SFPA Rhysling award.
Linda D. Addison is the only author with fiction in three landmark anthologies that celebrate African-American speculative writers: the award-winning anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction (Warner Aspect), Dark Dreams I and II (Kensington), and Dark Thirst (Pocket Book).
She co-edited Sycorax’s Daughters, an anthology of horror fiction & poetry by African-American women (publisher Cedar Grove Publishing) with Kinitra Brooks and Susana Morris.
She has over 300 poems and short stories in print. She has published in Essence Magazine, Asimov’s SF Magazine, Eye to the Telescope magazine, Apex Magazine, Spectral Realms and Carpe Noctem. She is a founding member of the writer’s group Circles in the Hair (CITH) and a member of SFWA, HWA and SFPA.
Photo by Stu Jenks