Major Guests
Guest of Honor: Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Locus and World Fantasy awards. Her novel Trail of Lightning (Book 1 in the Sixth World series) was selected as an Amazon, B&N, Library Journal, and NRP Best Books of 2018, among others, and is a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus award finalist for 2019. Book 2 in the Sixth World series, Storm of Locusts, has received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist. Her next novel, Resistance Reborn, is part of Star Wars: Journey to The Rise of Skywalker and is out in November 2019. Her middle-grade novel Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan Presents Imprint will release in January of 2020. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pups.
Toastmaster: Marshall Ryan Maresca
Marshall Ryan Maresca is a fantasy and science-fiction writer and the author of the Maradaine Saga: four parallel series set amid the bustling streets and crime-ridden districts of the exotic city called Maradaine. This includes The Thorn of Dentonhill, A Murder of Mages, The Holver Alley Crew, and The Way of the Shield. His work also appeared in Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction and Rick Klaw’s anthology Rayguns Over Texas. He also has had several short plays produced. He lives in Austin with his family. Marshall is a past Director of the ArmadilloCon Writers’ Workshop. For more, check out http://mrmaresca.com.
Fan Guest: Dan Tolliver
Dan Tolliver has been working in Central Texas fandom for over 20 years. He ran ArmadilloCon’s art show several times. He chaired or co-chaired ArmadilloCon four times. An avid photographer, Dan’s work has appeared in fannish publications including the cover of the ArmadilloCon 22 program book. Dan is the longtime historian for the Fandom Association of Central Texas (FACT), ArmadilloCon’s sponsoring organizing. In that role, he archives documents and photographs chronicling the history of Central Texas fandom.
Editor Guest: Patrice Caldwell
Patrice Caldwell is a graduate of Wellesley College and the founder & fundraising chair of People of Color in Publishing–a grassroots organization dedicated to supporting, empowering, and uplifting racially and ethnically marginalized members of the book publishing industry. Born and raised in Texas, Patrice was a children’s book editor before shifting to writing full-time. In 2018, she was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch honoree and featured on The Writer’s Digest podcast and Bustle’s inaugural “Lit List” as one of ten women changing the book world. Visit her online at patricecaldwell.com, Twitter @whimsicallyours, and Instagram @whimsicalaquarian. Look for her anthology, A Phoenix First Must Burn, a collection of 16 speculative fiction tales centering Black girls and gender nonconforming teens, out March 2020 from Viking Children’s Books/Penguin Teen!
Science Guest: Dr. Moriba K. Jah
Dr. Moriba K. Jah joined the University of Texas Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in 2017. His research interests are in non-gravitational astrodynamics and advanced/non-linear multi-sensor/object tracking, prediction, and information fusion. His expertise is in space object detection, tracking, identification, and characterization, as well as spacecraft navigation. Previously he worked at the University of Arizona and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Earlier, he was a spacecraft navigator for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA, serving on Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express (joint mission with ESA), Mars Exploration Rovers, Hayabusa (joint mission with JAXA), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Special Guest: Martha Wells
Martha Wells has written many fantasy novels, including The Books of the Raksura series (beginning with The Cloud Roads), the Ile-Rien series (including The Death of the Necromancer) as well as YA fantasy novels, short stories, media tie-ins (for Star Wars and Stargate: Atlantis), and non-fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel is The Harbors of the Sun in 2017, the final novel in The Books of the Raksura series. She has a new series of SF novellas, The Murderbot Diaries, published by Tor.com in 2017 and 2018. She was also the lead writer for the story team of Magic: the Gathering‘s Dominaria expansion in 2018. She has won a Nebula Award, a Hugo Award, an ALA/YALSA Alex Award, a Locus Award, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List. Martha was Guest of Honor for ArmadilloCon 24.
Regional Guests
David Afsharirad
David Afsharirad is the editor of The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF series as well as the upcoming anthology The Chronicles of Davids. His short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He lives in Austin, TX.
Sanford Allen
Sanford Allen, at various times, has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, a college journalism instructor and a touring musician. He’s the author of the horror novel Deadly Passage and his short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Stoker Award-winning After Death, Horror Library and Rayguns Over Texas, to name a few.
Robert Ashcroft
Robert Ashcroft has worked as a State Department contractor and was trained as a cryptologic linguist. Most recently, he was mobilized to serve abroad with the U.S. Army Reserve. A lifelong fan of science fiction, Ashcroft spent nearly a decade after college staying up late to write novels, at one point going so far as to quit his job and rent an apartment in Mexico City to write. His main goal for the foreseeable future is to be able to travel and encounter interesting people and ideas. His first novel, The Megarothke, was published by Cinestate in 2018.
Miracle Austin
Miracle Austin works in the social work arena by day and in the writer’s world at night and on weekends. She’s a YA/NA cross-genre hybrid author; adults also enjoy her works. She’s been writing since junior high, and “Drive” by The Cars is one of her biggest inspirations to write. She enjoys writing free-verse poems/mini-stories and short stories. Horror and suspense are her favorite genres, but she’s not limited to them. Her novels include the paranormal trilogy Doll, Doll 2: The Revealing, and Doll 3: The Hunting. Her short fiction is collected in Boundless. Miracle resides in Texas with her family and looks forward to hearing from her readers.
Paul Benjamin
Paul Benjamin is a New York Times bestselling author who has written and produced comics and video games for diverse properties including many Marvel characters such as Hulk, Spider-Man, and Wolverine, many DC characters in DC Universe Online, plus Disney Princesses, Star Wars, Star Trek, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, the Muppets, Monsters, Inc., G.I. Joe, and more. He is a contributing essayist in books about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, G.I. Joe, and others. His first prose short story appeared in The Protectors anthology. His original manga series Pantheon High was a YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens nominee.
Matthew Bey
A podcaster, writer, and outdoor communicator, Matthew Bey may be remembered as part of the Space Squid team, the opening contributor to the Rayguns Over Texas anthology, and for editing work on a number of spec fic publications such as RevolutionSF.com and The Drabblecast podcast.
Jon Black
Jon Black writes historical fiction with pulp, supernatural, or Mythos twists. His award-winning Bel Nemeton series combines 6th-century Arthurian historical fantasy with 21st-century pulp. Jon’s short stories “Gabriel’s Trumpet,” a Jazz Age supernatural mystery, and “A Scandal in Hollywood” a tongue-in-cheek Sherlock Holmes homage set against the backdrop of Hollywood”s golden age, are both winners of Preditors & Editors Reader’s Choice awards. He is also an internationally published music journalist, a powerful influence on his stories, and writes for roleplaying games. Jon was 42 when he first tried his hand at fiction — and wishes he’d started a lot sooner.
Jayme Lynn Blaschke
Jayme Lynn Blaschke is the author of Inside the Texas Chicken Ranch: The Definitive Account of the Best Little Whorehouse and co-author of the photo book Ghosts of the Chicken Ranch with Lisa Elliott Blaschke. His fiction has appeared in Interzone, Fast Ships, Black Sails and Cross Plains Universe, among other places. He’s the former fiction editor of RevolutionSF and former media director for SFWA. A collected volume of his SF-themed interviews, Voices of Vision: Creators of Science Fiction and Fantasy Speak, is available from the University of Nebraska Press. Blaschke lives in New Braunfels, Texas, where he is currently working on a YA science fiction novel titled Sailing Venus.
Catrin Blythe
Catrin Blythe is a young writer-director and a 2019 graduate of the McCallum High School Fine Arts Academy Motion Picture Arts program in Austin, TX. Her films have screened at the Colorado Independent Women of Film festival in Denver and at the Austin Film Festival in the Young Filmmaker competition. She is active in the Austin film community and has served as a production assistant and second AC for other area filmmakers. She plans to attend college in the fall of 2019 and has already been accepted into nationally ranked film schools. In addition to filmmaking, she enjoys role-play gaming, creating art, and powerlifting.
Scott Bobo
Scott Bobo is an ardent fan who has been attending science fiction conventions since 1975. He attended the first ArmadilloCon and has returned for most ever since. He co-wrote with Kurt Baty the party review column for the WorldCon daily newsletter during the 1990s.
Michael Bracken
Michael Bracken has authored several books, including All White Girls, and more than 1,300 short stories published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Pulp Literature, The Best American Mystery Stories, Weirdbook, and many other anthologies and periodicals. Additionally, he is the editor of several crime fiction anthologies, including the three-volume Fedora series and The Eyes of Texas, scheduled for fall 2019 release from Down & Out Books. Learn more at www.CrimeFictionWriter.com.
K. Tempest Bradford
K. Tempest Bradford is a science fiction and fantasy writer, writing instructor, media critic, reviewer, and podcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines including Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Sunspot Jungle, In the Shadow of the Towers, and many more. She’s the host of ORIGINality, a podcast about the roots of creative genius, and contributes to several more. Her media criticism and reviews can be found on NPR, io9, and in books about Time Lords. When not writing, she teaches classes on writing inclusive fiction through LitReactor and Writing the Other.com. Visit her website at ktempestbradford.com.
Jeremy Brett
Jeremy Brett is the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University. He has also worked as an archivist for the Wisconsin Historical Society, the National Archives and Records Administration – Pacific Region, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Iowa.
Christopher Brown
Christopher Brown is the author of Tropic of Kansas, which was a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year. He was a World Fantasy Award nominee for Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, an anthology he co-edited and helped translate. His new novel, Rule of Capture, a dystopian legal thriller Cory Doctorow described as “like a courtroom scene in an unpublished Hunter S. Thompson novel,” is forthcoming from Harper Voyager in August 2019.
Elizabeth K. Burton
Elizabeth K. Burton is a native Pennsylvanian transplanted with great glee to Austin, Texas. She is the author of several highly praised fantasy novels: Dreams of Darkness and Shadow of the Scorpion, Books 1 and 2 of the Everdark Wars trilogy; and The Ugly Princess, which was also published in Swedish. She is the executive editor and acquisitions editor for Zumaya and has been a professional editor for more than twenty years. Burton is a native Pennsylvanian transplanted with great glee to Austin, Texas. She and her husband Phil are currently owned by three cats. She has four children, three children-in-law and five grandchildren, all of whom reside too far outside of driving distance. She co-chaired ArmadilloCon 32.”Anne McCaffrey used to say in her capsule biography she had blue eyes and silver hair, the rest was subject to change without notice. Who am I to try and improve on Anne McCaffrey. Writer, editor, publisher, activist. What would you like to talk about?”
A. T. Campbell, III
A. T. Campbell, III has been involved in Texas fandom for over 20 years. He’s helped run local cons (ArmadilloCon, OwlCon, ApolloCon), a WesterCon, a WorldCon, and 2 World Fantasy Conventions. He organizes a SF/F reading group that recently discussed its 550th book. He was a graphics programmer in the video game industry for many years, and now he writes medical visualization software. A.T. lives in Austin with his lovely wife Carol and faithful dog Bridgette. He was Fan Guest at ArmadilloCon 39.
Matt Cardin
Matt Cardin is the author of Dark Awakenings, Divinations of the Deep, and A Course in Demonic Creativity. He edited the major two-volume reference work Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears, published in September 2017 from Greenwood. In a separate life, he is Assistant Vice President at Ranger College Erath County, where he also teaches English and religion.
D Chang
D Chang is the senior editor and art editor at spacesquid.com (“your puny planet’s finest scifi, experimental, and fantasy”). His superpowers include building flying cat iconography in Photoshop and remembering his parking spot. He’s eaten Larry Ellison’s dinner, sung with the Houston Symphony, worked on some semi-famous videogames, and accidentally body-slammed Sigourney Weaver. His story “The Climbers” was published in 2015’s Avast, Ye Airships. He got an English degree from a fancy-pants university which is solely responsible for any flaws in his work. You can find more at spacesquid.com and sparkleworks.com, and you can snag a free demo of the retro RPG he co-wrote at videogamewriter.com/free-demo.
Dantzel CherryDantzel Cherry teaches Pilates and raises her daughter by day. By night and naptime, she writes. Her baking hours follow no rhyme or reason. He short stories have been published in magazines such as Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Cast of Wonders, as well as anthologies like Little Green Men–Attack!, Cats in Space, and Funny Science Fiction.
Cassandra Rose Clarke
Cassandra Rose Clarke‘s work has placed in the Rhysling Awards and been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award, the Pushcart Prize, and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. She grew up in south Texas and currently lives in Houston, where she writes and serves as the associate director for Writespace, a literary arts nonprofit. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. Her latest novel is Halo: Battle Born, out now from Scholastic.
Jennifer Rose Davis
Jennifer Rose Davis is a graphic designer, costumer, mask maker, artist, actress, singer, musician, and all-around Renaissance woman. She has a BFA from the University of Texas in graphic design, a B.A. in vocal performance from Texas State University, and is self-taught in the other arts that she pursues.
Bradley Denton
Bradley Denton is an Austin-based writer of science fiction and fantasy. He studied under science fiction author/scholar James Gunn at the University of Kansas, where he earned degrees in astronomy and English. His novels include Wrack and Roll, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Blackburn, Lunatics, and Laughin’ Boy. His collection The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians/A Conflagration Artist won the 1995 World Fantasy Award. More recent short fiction has been collected in One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality and Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas. Denton was the Toastmaster of ArmadilloCon 16 and Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon 20.
Aaron de Orive
Aaron de Orive was a writer/designer on a variety of video game titles, including Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, Tabula Rasa, Anarchy Online, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. He co-authored the middle-grade fantasy novel Blade Singer with Martha Wells. As a tabletop role-playing game author and designer, Aaron created Shard: World of the False Dawn. He is a narrative consultant via Cloak & Dagger Studios, and is also the founder and co-host of The Gentlemen Nerds podcast. Aaron lives in Austin with his daughter and a spoiled Yorkie.
Amanda Downum
Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and The Poison Court, as well as numerous short stories. She lives in Austin, TX. She keeps a snake and studies Mortuary Science. Do not take an apple from her.
Nicky Drayden
Nicky Drayden is a Systems Analyst who dabbles in prose when she’s not buried in code. She resides in Austin, Texas where being weird is highly encouraged, if not required. Her award-winning novel The Prey of Gods is set in a futuristic South Africa brimming with demigods, robots, and hallucinogenic hijinks. See more of her work at http://www.nickydrayden.com or catch her on twitter@nickydrayden.
Rhonda Eudaly
Rhonda Eudaly lives in Arlington, Texas where she’s ventured into several industries and occupations for a wide variety of experience. She’s married with dogs and a rapidly growing Minion© army. Her two passions are writing and music, which is evident in her increasing horde of writing instruments. Rhonda has a well-rounded publication history in fiction, non-fiction, and script writing. Check out her website – www.RhondaEudaly.com – for her latest publications and downloads.
Paige E. Ewing
Paige E. Ewing writes about superheroes and sentient cities, were-spiders and gun-loving fairies. For a living, she hawks big data analysis, machine learning software. For fun, she shoots arrows at people and things. She lives in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and flies a lot to get somewhere, usually in planes. She once invented a way to grow food on Mars that NASA liked, and has a cute trophy to show for it. Her dogs are unimpressed.
Gabrielle Faust
Author, artist, and entertainment journalist Gabrielle Faust is best known for her post-apocalyptic vampire series Eternal Vigilance. Crowned “Vampire Royalty of New Orleans” in 2010, Faust has successfully released over eleven horror and dark fantasy novels and anthologies since 2008. Her work as an entertainment journalist has appeared in dozens of publications around the world including SyFy, Blastr, Fear Zone, Girls & Corpses, and Gothic Beauty Magazine. In 2013 she founded her own independent press, Nightshade Publications, in Austin, Texas.
Ariane Felix
Born and raised in Brazil, Ariane holds a B.A. in Computer Science and moved to Texas in 2011 to pursue her career as a writer. She’s writing her fifth novel, and her short story, “The Witch and the Hunter”, was published in Dragons and Witches (Fairy Tale Villains Reimagined), an anthology by CBAY Books, which got a positive Kirkus review. Her YA sci-fi horror manuscript was selected as a 2016 Pitch Wars finalist, and her MG fantasy manuscript won first place in the children’s category of the 2014 Houston Writer’s Guild Fall Contest. She’s an agent intern, a reader for Foreshadow (a Serial YA Anthology, edited by NYT bestselling authors Nova Ren Suma and Emily X.R. Pan), and also works as a freelance editor. Visit her at arianefelix.com.
Sara Felix
Sara Felix is a 2019 Hugo Finalist in the Fan Art Category. She is a mixed-media artist working in inks and resins whose art can be seen at various conventions throughout the country every year. She is the president of ASFA (the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists), which gives out the Chesley Award, one of the premier genre awards for artists. She has curated numerous art displays, including the Infinite Worlds gallery show in 2018 as well as art panels at conventions for several ASFA artists. She lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Mark Finn
Mark Finn is an author, an editor, and a pop culture critic. He is a nationally-recognized authority on Robert E. Howard and has written extensively about the Texas author. He is a managing editor for Skelos Press, and he podcasts with The Gentlemen Nerds. When he is not waxing eloquent about popular culture, he writes comics and fiction, dabbles in magic, and produces and performs community theater. He lives in North Texas with his long-suffering wife, too many books, and an affable pit bull named Sonya.
Eugene Fischer
Eugene Fischer is an Austin-based author of speculative fiction. His work has won the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award and been a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards. He’s a graduate of Clarion and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While at Iowa he created the undergraduate course Writing and Reading Science Fiction, which is still being offered to this day.
Brad W. Foster
Brad W. Foster, international jet setter and ex-secret agent, sometimes dabbles in pen and ink. His artwork has been published in literally over 3,000 diverse books, magazines, posters, prints, cards, and a little of everything else! His small press, Jabberwocky Graphix, issues fine-art prints and art collections. He and his lovely wife Cindy travel around the country to show his work at art festivals, science fiction and comic conventions, cat shows, and (formerly) the Texas Renaissance Festival. Brad has won eight Hugo awards for Best Fan Artist. He was Artist Guest at ArmadilloCon 10. Brad and Cindy are slowly developing a huge cast of characters for a new project that will combine his fine art and comic-book sides. He’ll continue to draw whenever he can, just for the fun of it. His motto says it all: “Leave no piece of paper blank!”
Joseph Fotinos
Joseph Fotinos (Professor Griffin) is an actor, writer, producer, Halloween enthusiast, monster toy collector, and cosplayer. Joseph studied improv and sketch comedy at Chicago’s Second City, Improv Olympic and Annoyance Theater. From 1999-2007, Joseph was the creator, host, co-producer and writer of Prof. Griffin’s Midnight Shadow Show (a television late-night horror host show.) and the official Horror Host for the national cable channel, Fangoria TV. As Professor Griffin, Fotinos hosted the live premiere of IFC’s American Nightmare with Tobe Hooper, appeared on SPIKE TV, worked with TNT and was blessed by Universal with the official title of Official Universal Monster Spokesperson (for Central Texas). Professor Griffin hosted the World Premiere of Freddy vs. Jason and was featured in the 2006 Horror Host documentary feature, American Scary. In 2019, Prof. Griffin was honored with induction into the Horror Host Hall of Fame. Joseph’s first book, The Midnight Shadow Show- Prof. Griffin Journals– was released by Publish America in 2005 and he was a featured writer for both Scary Monsters Magazine and Fangoria.com. Joseph is also a producer at Broom Closet Studios and has produced, shorts, videos and two feature films, The Legend of Ghostwolf and The Magnificent Dead. Joseph lives in Austin Texas with his wife Brandy, has a 17-year-old son, and has actually met and has corresponded with both the late, great Vincent Price and his writing inspiration Ray Bradbury. Did we mention he loves horror movies?
Bill Frank
Bill Frank was one of the first members of the International Space Center Mission Control team. He happily gave up night and weekend work to move to the Spaceflight Training Management Office where he works as a Chief Training Officer — he leads the team that creates problems for astronauts and mission controllers during training events. His voice can be heard in the movies Gravity, The Martian, and Transformers: The Last Knight.
Paris Freeman
Paris Freeman has been a fan of the inner works of film making. He dedicated himself to learning the ins and outs of film and began writing his first Doctor Who fan film screenplay at the age of fifteen and began building props and sets a year later. Paris wrote and directed his first two fan films, Born Again and Silver Dawn, over the same summer. Paris is eager to share his experience of building props and models, screenwriting, editing, and special effects with fellow and future filmmakers.
Sean Freeman
Born helpless, naked, and unable to fend for himself, Sean Freeman eventually overcame these handicaps and at age 10 wrote and directed a number of short films, all of which involved wizards, robots, and/or prodigious blood spray. Now, after a brief 29-year hiatus, urged on by a rabid fan base numbering in the threes, he and his childhood chum Chris Irby have united to inflict their work on unsuspecting theatergoers in the Dallas area. They have inflicted 6 plays on unsuspecting Pocket Sandwich Theatre patrons since 2006, including Chrono Cops, Hercules, The Legend of Deadeye Mary, and the inexplicably popular Captain Phantasm series.
Urania Fung
Urania Fung is an English professor at Tarrant County College where she hosts WORDfest, an annual festival involving over twenty writer organizations around DFW. Her short stories have been published by DAW in the anthologies Ages of Wonder and The Dragon and the Stars. This fall, her latest short story, “A Debate over the Hopping Undead” will come out in the anthology Immersion: An Asian Anthology of Love, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction.
The Gentlemen Nerds
The Gentlemen Nerds are three entertainment aficionados and their intentional producer, gathering together for some much-needed civil discourse on the subject of entertainment and popular culture. Just three adults waxing rhapsodic on the things they think are cool or delving deeply into why one of them likes something and another does not. The Gentlemen Nerds podcast is like your favorite convention panel that you can listen to anytime, anywhere, and now you can attend a live recording session with Aaron de Orive, Joseph Fotinos, Mark Finn, and Ben Gibbs.
John K Gibbons
John K. Gibbons is an occasional SF author, volunteer NASA JPL speaker, hiker, and SF fan. He has chaired or co-chaired ArmadilloCon 6 times. Ask him about hiking in England!
Jason Guinn Jason Guinn lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife and daughter. Threshold is his second novel. His first is devilishly dark, Urban Fantasy The Wretched through Burning Bulb Publications. He is a proud member of the Dallas Writers Workshop with best-selling author A. Lee Martinez and other up-and-coming talents.
C Stuart Hardwick
C Stuart Hardwick is a winner of the prestigious Writers of the Future contest and the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award. His work regularly appears in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, as well as Galaxy’s Edge, Forbes.com and Mental Floss, among others. A southerner from South Dakota, Stuart grew up creating radio dramas and animated shorts before moving on to robots and ill-conceived flying machines. He’s worked with the creators of the video game Doom, married an aquanaut, and trained his dog to pull a sled. Stuart studied writing at U.C. Berkeley, lives in Houston, and has been known to wear a cape. For more information and a free signed e-sampler, visit www.cStuartHardwick.com.
David Hardy
Dave Hardy is a Robert E. Howard fan, author, and ArmadilloCon regular. He is the author of Brothers By The Gun, Blood On the Border, Palmetto Empire and other Westerns as well as the Sword & Sorcery novel, Crazy Greta, and many other tales. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family.
James A. Hearn
James A. Hearn is an attorney and writer living in Georgetown, Texas. He writes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime stories. His crime fiction credits include “Trip Among the Bluebonnets,” forthcoming in The Eyes of Texas (Down & Out Books, 2019); “A Beretta, Burritos and Bears,” forthcoming in Guns + Tacos (Down & Out Books, 2019), and “The Hard Luck Case,” forthcoming in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir (Down & Out Books, 2020). James has been a Finalist and Semi-Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest, a quarterly short story contest honoring new writers in science fiction and fantasy.
Kenneth Mark Hoover
Kenneth Mark Hoover has sold over sixty short stories and articles. A member of SFWA, his fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Frontier Tales, and many others. He is at present working on a series of dark western novels and stories set in the mythical town of Haxan, New Mexico, circa 1874. Quaternity was published by CZP/HarperCollins in 2015. His next novel, Seven Devils, will appear in 2019. You can find out more about his work at kennethmarkhoover.me.
Chris Irby
Chris Irby is an Aries and a liberal, loved by children and pets across the nation. He is the proud coauthor (along with his longtime pal Sean Freeman) of several plays that have been produced by the Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Dallas, including The Final Adventure of Hercules, Captain Phantasm and the Countdown To Doom, and The Legend Of Deadeye Mary. When he’s not collaborating theatrically, he enjoys drinking bourbon, spending time with his lovely fiancee, and patiently explaining to people on the internet why they’re wrong.
Al Jackson
Al Jackson started out as a fan in Dallas in 1954 with the first SF club in Texas, the Dallas Futurians. The DFs held the first Texas SF convention in Dallas in August 1958. He also was a member of the Houston Science Fiction Society starting around 1966. He re-founded the University of Texas SF club in the early 1970s. He spent most of his years (from 1966) at the Johnson Space Center, doing all kinds of things from training astronauts during Apollo, to computing where space debris would be and go. He officially retired in 2010.
Britta Jensen
Britta Jensen‘s YA SF debut novel Eloia Born was long-listed for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. The sequel, Hirana Bound, will release in early summer 2020. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Henshaw Press, Fiction Factory, and Retreat West prizes and she was published in the following anthologies: Stories for Homes, volume 2 and Sakura Dreams. Britta spent twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany before moving to Austin, Texas in 2018.
Derek A. Johnson
Derek Austin Johnson has lived most of his life in the Lone Star State. A member of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, his work has appeared in Rayguns Over Texas!, Skull Fragments: A Skelos Sampler, Nova Express, Moving Pictures, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant, and Revolution SF. He lives in Central Texas with the Goddess.
Scott A. JohnsonScott A. Johnson is the author of nine horror novels, three true ghost guides, a short story collection, and a chapbook. He is a graduate of Emerson’s Writing and Publishing Popular Fiction MFA program, and teaches in the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University.
Jennifer Juday
Jennifer Juday is the Chair of ArmadilloCon 41, and very much hopes you’ll enjoy this year’s convention. Her first ever job was at Houston Public Library, with work as assistant to the children’s librarian being a special highlight. She studied English at Rice and Information Science at the University of North Texas. She has worked in three independent bookstores, selecting new mystery and SFF titles for one of them. These days, she works in corporate training and still reads voraciously. Give her feedback on this year’s con, and we’ll work to make 2020 even better!
Rick Klaw
Besides his current tenure as the Social Media Maven and occasional editor for Tachyon Publications, the so-called optimistic curmudgeon Richard “Rick” Klaw has edited numerous publications, most notably the anthologies The Apes of Wrath, Rayguns Over Texas, and the groundbreaking Weird Business (with Joe Lansdale). For Tachyon, he’s responsible for the Lansdale Hap and Leonard books (watch for the new one in 2020). In the 90s the Klaw-fronted Mojo Press predicated several of the 21st-century publishing models. As a writer, he has provided countless reviews, essays, and fiction for a variety of publications including The Austin Chronicle, Blastr, Moving Pictures Magazine, San Antonio Current, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Geek Dad, SF Site, RevolutionSF, Electric Velocipede, and The San Antonio Business Journal. Many of his writings were collected in Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century (MonkeyBrain).
Joe R. Lansdale
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of 50 novels, over 400 short pieces, numerous screenplays, comic scripts, and essays. He has received numerous recognitions including an Edgar, a Spur, and 10 Bram Stokers. Films and a TV series have been made from his work. Among them Cold In July, Bubba Ho-Tep, and Hap and Leonard, now on Netflix, along with two episodes in Love, Death, and Robots. Forthcoming on Shudder TV is The Companion, a story written with Keith and Kasey Lansdale as part of Creepshow.
Alexis Glynn Latner
Alexis Glynn Latner’s science fiction novel Hurricane Moon was published by Pyr in 2007 and again by Avendis Press in 2014 with the sequels Downfall Tide, Star Crossing, and Helldive. Her new SF series begins with the novel Witherspin in late 2019. Her science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery stories have appeared in Analog and other print magazines and in print, online, and e-book anthologies including Pets in Space®. She works at the Rice University Library in Houston, and teaches creative writing through Rice’s School of Continuing Studies.
William Ledbetter
William Ledbetter is a Nebula Award-winning author with more than seventy speculative fiction stories and non-fiction articles published in four languages, in markets such as Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Escape Pod, Baen.com, the SFWA blog, and Ad Astra. He’s been a space and technology geek since childhood and spent most of his non-writing career in the aerospace and defense industry. He administers the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award contest for Baen Books and the National Space Society, is a member of SFWA, the National Space Society of North Texas, a Launch Pad Astronomy workshop graduate, and is the Science Track coordinator for the Fencon convention. He lives near Dallas with his wife, a needy dog and two spoiled cats.
Stina Leicht
Stina Leicht writes science fiction and fantasy. Her next novel, Persephone Station, a Feminist Space Opera, will be published by Saga Press in 2020. She was a finalist for the Crawford Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2011 and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. She has four Fantasy novels: Cold Iron, Blackthorne, Of Blood and Honey, and And Blue Skies from Pain.
Bob Mahoney
Who & what is Bob Mahoney? Rocket scientist, house-dad (5k), novelist, middle school science/math/writing skills teacher, and ongoing medical experiment. After teaching astronauts to fly the shuttle (computers, navigation, rendezvous, prox ops, docking, & tethers) he returned to Austin to write space thrillers which landed him some freelance editing work. He’s published darn thoughtful essays in The Space Review and other venues. From NJ, his passion for spaceflight carried him to TX enabling rendezvous with his wife Margie (26.66 years). After his recent curative bone marrow transplant courtesy of the NIH in MD (and his anonymous German donor), he celebrates every sunrise while pondering possible prognostications regarding his reset reality. Danke Gott.
Julia S. Mandala
Julia S. Mandala holds a BA in history from Kansas State University and a JD in law from Tulane University. In addition to being editor of The Fantasy Writers Asylum, an imprint of Yard Dog Press, she is a scuba diver and belly dancer. She lives in Plano, TX with her husband Larry and two very demanding, but adorable cats. She is best known as a co-author of the Four Redheads of the Apocalypse series and the Corimar series.
Ari Marmell
When Ari Marmell has free time left over between feeding cats and posting on social media, he writes a little bit. His work includes novels, short stories, role-playing games, and video games, all of which he enjoyed in lieu of school work when growing up. He’s the author of the Mick Oberon fantasy/noir series, the Widdershins YA fantasy series, The Goblin Corps, The Iron Devils, and many others, with publishers such as Del Rey, Pyr Books, Wizards of the Coast, Omnium Gatherum, and Titan Books. Ari currently resides in Austin, Texas. He lives in a clutter that has a moderate amount of apartment in it, along with George—his wife—and the aforementioned cats, who probably want something.
Michael E. Marotta
Mike Marotta is a card-carrying criminologist and an award-winning numismatist. He was granted a BS in criminology by Eastern Michigan University (2008), and an MA by EMU for research into transnational white collar crime. The ANA granted him two Heath Literary Awards. The first was for an article on the origins of coinage which corrected the Encyclopedia Britannica. The second was for a biography of Sir Isaac Newton’s tenure as warden and master of the British Royal Mint. He holds the rank of sergeant in the Texas Military Department where he serves as a public affairs officer.
J. M. McDermott
Joe M McDermott is the author of nine books and many short stories. His work includes The Fortress at the End of Time from Tor.com, and Maze from Apex Publications. He can be found at patreon.com/jmmcdermott.
C.J. Mills
C. J. Mills grew up in Yankee lands and has only been living in Texas since 2000 (but she was coming down for ArmadilloCon for years before that). A writer by inheritance as well as inclination — her mother and her mother’s mother were both journalists; her paternal grandmother and aunt both wrote short stories –and she has six novels published (counting hardcover and paperback editions of Three Rivers as one book); Three Rivers was nominated for a best-first-novel award by the Western Writers’ Association. NB: She learned to write very long sentences in her German studies, which led eventually to a K-12 teaching certificate and a Certifikat Deutsch from the Goethe Institute. She has two grown sons, who still live in Minnesota. Her hobbies are music, vintage and foreign doll collecting, and language collecting, too — Deutsch, French, and Norwegian so far, Spanish and Swedish sitting on a shelf awaiting their turns
Elizabeth Moon
Elizabeth Moon grew up in South Texas near the Mexican border, giving her early experience with major cultural differences and leading to a lifelong fascination with how culture shapes individuals and how they adapt (or don’t) to new experiences. She has degrees in both history (Rice University) and biology (University of Texas). She served three years of active duty in the Marine Corps. She married her husband while both were in the military; they have one adult son. Moon’s first fiction sales, in 1985, included an epic fantasy story and a hard SF story sold to Analog. She continues to go back and forth between science fiction and fantasy. Her first novel won the Compton Crook award for best first novel in 1988. She’s published more than 25 novels since. She won the Nebula Award for best novel with The Speed of Dark, and was a finalist for the Hugo in 1997 for Remnant Population. Moon was Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon 16.
Michelle Muenzler
Michelle Muenzler, known at local science fiction and fantasy conventions as “The Cookie Lady”, writes fiction both dark and strange to counterbalance the sweetness of her baking. Her short fiction and poetry can be read in numerous science fiction and fantasy magazines, and she takes immense joy in crinkling words like little foil puppets. Visit michellemuenzler.com for links to more of her work, or if you are feeling especially brave, check out her squidgy weird buddy adventure novella The Hills of Meat, the Forest of Bone on Amazon. She promises it won’t bite…much.
Robin R. Murphy
Dr. Robin R. Murphy is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and a director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, and an IEEE Fellow. She specializes in human-robot interaction and human-centered AI for ground, air, and marine robots. She is the author of over 150 papers and four books including the award-winning Disaster Robotics, a TED speaker, and founder of Roboticists Without Borders. She has deployed ground, air, and marine robots to over 29 disasters in five countries including the 9/11 World Trade Center, Katrina, and Fukushima, Hurricane Harvey and the Kilauea volcanic eruption. Her innovative teaching style has resulted in Robotics Through Science Fiction: Artificial Intelligence Explained Through Six Classic Robot Short Stories (MIT Press, 2018) and the Robotics Through Science Fiction blog.
Michael Noll
Michael Noll is the author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction, Program Director at the Writers’ League of Texas, and the editor of the craft-of-writing blog Read to Write Stories. His short stories have been published widely, including in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology and, most recently, in Crazyhorse.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Suyi Davies Okungbowa is the author of David Mogo, Godhunter (Abaddon, 2019) and of internationally published fiction and nonfiction. His shorter works have appeared or are forthcoming in Tor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Fireside, Podcastle, The Dark and other periodicals and anthologies. He lives online at suyidavies.com and tweets at @IAmSuyiDavies.
Gloria Oliver
Gloria Oliver lives in Texas, making sure to stay away from rolling tumbleweeds while bowing to the never-ending wishes of her feline and canine masters. She is the author of In the Service of Samurai, Vassal of El, Cross-eyed Dragon Troubles, Willing Sacrifice, The Price of Mercy, Inner Demons, and Jewel of the Gods. The novels are fantasy, young adult fantasy, and urban fantasy (notice a pattern?), several with romantic elements. Her first science fiction novel Alien Redemption should see publication in 2019 from Zumaya Otherworlds. She is a member in good standing of EPIC, Broad Universe, SASS, and Future Classics (ask us about our antho!), though she has yet to make the list for Cat Slaves R Us. For free reads, sample chapters, social media links, and more info, please drop by and visit her at www.gloriaoliver.com.
Juan Perez
Juan Manuel Pérez is the Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi (2019-2020) who also works as a successful public high school history teacher in the Texas Coastal Bend Area. The Push Cart Nominee and El Chupacabras Poet Laureate likes to write poems about Cryptozoology (mainly el Chupacabras & Bigfoot), Ufology (to include the Ancient Alien Theory), Horror (to include slasher poems), Science Fiction, Comic Books, Food, History (and Pseudo-History/Alternate History), Culture (Indigenous/First Nation people, and Mexican-American/Border Life) and Military Life (Desert Storm Veteran).
Lawrence Person
Lawrence Person is a science fiction writer living in Austin, Texas. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Postscripts, Fear, Jim Baen’s Universe, Galaxy’s Edge, and several anthologies, including Rayguns Over Texas and Cross Plains Universe. His nonfiction has appeared in National Review, Reason, SF Eye, and NYRSF. He runs Lame Excuse Books and used to edit Nova Express. He also owns a celebrated library of Science Fiction first editions.
John Picacio
John Picacio is a 2019 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Professional Artist and Best Related Work. He’s a two-time Hugo Award-winning illustrator who has created official best-selling artwork for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, as well as over 150 science fiction/fantasy book covers. He is currently re-imagineering Loteria — the classic Mexican game of chance — with all-new giant-size art cards and posters, published by Lone Boy. In 2018, he was the Artist Guest of Honor and Hugo Awards Master of Ceremonies at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention.
Alan J. Porter
Alan J. Porter writes about stuff, and makes up stories too. Pop Culture, Comics, Historical-Adventure fiction, Movies, Music, Business Content Strategy, and more. He has written adventures featuring classic characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain, Houdini, The Musketeers, Will Bill Hickok, and private eye Rick Ruby; as well as his own New Pulp adventurers, The Raven and The Lotus Ronin. His pop-culture non-fiction work has featured properties such as Batman, Star Trek, The Beatles, G.I. Joe, Battlestar Galactica, and James Bond. He has also written comics for Tokyopop, BOOM Studios, Marvel, Disney, and Kid Domino. Alan is a leading Content Strategist in the Technical, Business Communications, and Content Marketing industries with a couple of business books with his name on the cover. He was recognized as one of the Top 25 Content Strategists in 2016 and 2017.
Trakena PrevostTrakena Prevost was born and raised in the great state of Texas, where everything is bigger and the people are super friendly. She spends most of her time running around after her young son, trying tirelessly to annoy her husband to distraction, and oscillating between being completely obsessed with reading and Korean dramas. She also just so happens to write down the fantastic stories rumbling around in her head — mostly to quiet the voices that take residence there. When not reading and writing, Trakena spends her time working in HR, hanging with her family and friends, and desperately trying to force her love of reading on her little one.
Marguerite Reed
Born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Marguerite Reed spent the majority of her childhood with her nose in a book or exploring backyards and pony pastures. She sold her first short story, “Bearing Witness” to Strange Horizons. In 2015 her first novel, Archangel, was published by Arche Press, a division of Resurrection House; in 2016 it won the Philip K Dick Special Citation. She’s currently at work on more short fiction and a horror novel.
Jessica Reisman
Jessica Reisman’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her far future science fiction adventure novel Substrate Phantoms came out from Resurrection House Books May 2017 and Fairwood Press will publish her first collection, The Arcana of Maps and Other Stories, November 2019. She grew up on the east coast of the U.S., was a teenager on the west coast, and now lives in Austin, Texas. She’s been a writer, animal lover, reader, and movie aficionado since she was a wee child. Find out more at storyrain.com.
Rob Rogers
Rob Rogers is the author of Devil’s Cape, a superhero thriller set in Louisiana. Devil’s Cape was a Pop Matters pick and a HeroPress book of the year. His short stories have also appeared in the anthologies The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Triumph Over Tragedy, and This Mutant Life. Rob lives in Texas, where he continues to write about superheroes, pirates, aliens, mad cultists, dragons, interdimensional rifts, carnival freaks, and cowboys, often in the same stories.
Meredith Rose
Author Meredith Rose has been a literary rebel since the age of nine when she began rewriting novel endings she didn’t like. Childhood peers mocked her for using words longer than two syllables, and adults told her that she would never be able to make it as a writer–because it’s, like, not a real career. Thoroughly undaunted, over the next two decades she secretly pursued writing novels and finally sold her first book at age twenty-nine (under a different name). She went on to publish another three novels, wherein the experience of rewriting endings actually came in useful. Chains of Silver is her first young adult novel, and she wrote it for her two teenage daughters who are also talented rebels in their own ways. When she’s not writing, Meredith studies Welsh, dabbles in graphic design and altered art, and reads Tumblr way too much. Bucket list items include becoming a yarn bomber, Argentine tango dancer, and an opera singer.
Rie Sheridan Rose
Rie Sheridan Rose multitasks. A lot. Her short stories appear in numerous anthologies, including Nightmare Stalkers and Dream Walkers Vols. 1 and 2, and Killing It Softly. She has authored eight novels, six poetry chapbooks, and lyrics for dozens of songs. More info on www.riewriter.com. She tweets as @RieSheridanRose.
Josh Rountree
Josh Rountree writes fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Realms of Fantasy, Daily Science Fiction, and Rayguns over Texas. His stories have received honorable mention in both The Year’s Best Science Fiction and the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. Josh lives in the wilds of Texas with his wife and children.
Amber Royer
Amber Royer writes the Chocoverse comic telenovela-style foodie-inspired space opera series (available from Angry Robot Books). She is also co-author of There are Herbs in My Chocolate, which combines culinary herbs and chocolate in over 60 sweet and savory recipes. She teaches creative writing in North Texas for both UT Arlington Continuing Education and Writing Workshops Dallas. If you are very nice to her, she might make you cupcakes.
Katherine Sanger
Katherine Sanger was a Jersey Girl before getting smart and moving to Texas. She’s been published in various e-zines and print, including Baen’s Universe, Spaceports & Spidersilk, Black Petals, Star*Line, Anotherealm, Lost in the Dark, Bewildering Stories, Aphelion, and RevolutionSF, and edited From the Asylum, an e-zine of fiction and poetry, and Serial Flashers, a flash fiction e-zine.
Patrice Sarath
Patrice Sarath is the author of several novels including The Sisters Mederos and Fog Season (The Tales of Port Saint Frey) and Gordath Wood, Red Gold Bridge, and The Crow God’s Girl (The Books of the Gordath), soon to be republished as ebooks by SFGateway. She is also the author of several short stories that have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Weird Tales, Apex Digest, and many other magazines and anthologies. She lives in Austin.
Rebecca Schwarz
By day, Rebecca Schwarz is a mild-mannered editorial assistant for a scientific journal, by night she writes science fiction and fantasy stories. Her work has appeared in Interzone, PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, and Bourbon Penn among other venues. She is the Director of the ArmadilloCon Writing Workshop in Austin, Texas. She is currently writing a novel about a princess who becomes a crow. You can read about her writing adventures at www.curiousworlds.blog and follow her on Twitter@curiousworlds.
Adrian Simmons
Adrian Simmons is a reader, writer, and editor. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Internet Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Black Gate. His short fiction has been in James Gunn’s Ad Astra Magazine, Lackington’s, Giganotosaurus, and Strange Constellations. He is one-third of the editorial team of heroicfantasyquarterly.com.
Willie Siros
Willie Siros discovered convention fandom in 1974. He started and chaired Solarcon in El Paso in 1975. He moved to Austin in 1977, where he started and chaired the first four ArmadilloCons. Partnering with Robert Taylor, he designed a bid for the third NASFiC, which succeeded and became known as LoneStarCon 1. He started selling books at conventions in 1976, eventually partnering with Scott Cupp to become Two Guys From Texas Booksellers, which evolved into Adventures in Crime and Space Books. He partnered with Ed Scarbrough and Mike Emery to produce the fanzine Cambion. With his sister, Nina, he started a small press, SW&N Press, and inflicted short story collections upon the world by Neal Barrett, George Alec Effinger, and Gwyneth Jones. Willie was Fan Guest at ArmadilloCon 25.
Nancy Smith
Nancy Smith is the author of three novels (The Universal Vaccine, The Slow Kill, Tainted Harvest), one non-fiction book (Five Steps: from blank page to movie release). She has also written eighteen screenplays, four of which have sold, and twenty-two short stories. She has worked on over thirty narrative films as producer, director, script analyst, or script supervisor, and produced/directed over two hundred educational films. She was a second-round competition reader for the Austin Film Festival from 2001 to 2010 and in 2018. She graduated from the UCLA Professional Screenwriting Program in 2011. Nancy is the owner of First Look Script Analysis, operating since December 2005, and First Look Publishing, operating since 2016. She lives in Austin, Texas.
V Anne Smith
Dr. V Anne Smith is on the Biology faculty at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she researches computational biology. She applies computational models to biological systems as diverse as genes, brains, and ecosystems, and has strong interests in synthetic biology and machine learning. When not researching, she enjoys writing speculative fiction: she has published a few short stories and her first novel, A Code For Carolyn: A Genomic Thriller, forms part of Springer’s Science and Fiction series. As science fiction written by a scientist, the novel includes an essay where she explains the science behind the story.
Phillip T. Stephens
Phillip T. Stephens taught writing and design at Austin Community College for 20 years before retiring to write and foster siamese with his wife Carol. His writing and art appear in anthologies, online, print and peer-reviewed academic journals, most recently Maintenant and the horroraddicts.net Kill Switch anthology. His novel Raising Hell features a clueless optimist who ruins Lucifer’s perfectly good hell.
David R. Stokes
David R. Stokes was born and raised in Austin, but now lives in Scotland where he runs a small press, Guardbridge Books. He publishes science fiction and fantasy, often with a multi-cultural or international flavor. He has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in Astronomy, a Ph.D. in History from the University of St Andrews, and has studied a little bit of everything else in between. A real Renaissance man living 500 years after the Renaissance.
Patrick Sullivan
Patrick Sullivan is a published short story author. A screenwriter who has been a finalist in the Austin Film Festival and Final Draft competitions, and a semi-finalist in many, many more. An abuser of software. A martial artist. A fanboy who has met Harlan Ellison several times and has not been yelled at once.
J.A. Sutherland
J.A. Sutherland wrote his first novel in 1983 when he was sixteen. It was appropriately bad. A few short stories, and a few rejection slips, later, he gave up on writing – except the voices in his head refused to stop and he lived with them for thirty years. In 2013, he came across a “You won’t believe this is a thing! -link-” tweet and clicked on it, because he very much likes to know what he won’t believe is a thing. It was dinosaur-porn. His first reaction was not, “I don’t believe this is a thing!” it was “If there’s a market for this …” Figuring if there were people who wanted to be ravished by the raptor, then there must be those who’d read his stories, so he started taking dictation from the voices again, and published Into the Dark (Alexis Carew Book 1) in November 2014. The response has been overwhelming, and he can’t believe this is a thing.
L. Stephanie Tait
Stephanie completed a Bachelors of Arts in Film Studies from UW-Milwaukee. She earned a Masters of Arts from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and spent four and a half years pursuing a PhD with the University of Edinburgh’s Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Department. She also spent her time in Scotland curating and organizing independent film festivals and screenings with the Film House Theatre in Edinburgh, and the University of Edinburgh’s Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Department. Putting her PhD on hold, Stephanie moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to continue her work in producing, writing, and directing. When not creating fantastical realities on stage and screen, she runs Verthandi Press, and a monthly classical play reading group with her husband, artist Brian Carroll.
Lauren C. Teffeau
Lauren C. Teffeau is the author of Implanted (2018, Angry Robot), a cyberpunk/solarpunk adventure shortlisted for the 2019 Compton Crook award for best first SF/F/H novel. Her short fiction can be found in a variety of professional and semi-pro speculative fiction magazines and anthologies. She holds a master’s degree in Mass Communication and spent a few years toiling as a researcher in academia. She writes to cope with her ordinary existence.
Brian Trent
Brian Trent’s speculative fiction appears regularly in Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Terraform, Daily Science Fiction, Apex (winning the Story of the Year Reader’s Poll), Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Cosmos, Galaxy’s Edge, Nature, The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, Pseudopod, and numerous year’s best anthologies. The author of Ten Thousand Thunders and the Rahotep series, he is also a 2015 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award finalist and Writers of the Future winner. Trent lives in a foggy mountaintop town in New England. His website and blog are located at www.briantrent.com.
Mikal Trimm
Mikal Trimm has sold over 50 short stories and 100 poems to numerous venues including Postscripts, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And he is oddly beloved by marsupials, thanks to the strange Australian experiments conducted on him when he worked at Ideomancer (look it up).
Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner has been involved in Texas SFF fandom since he was an irritating teenager in the 1980s, publishing his own fanzines. After finishing school at UT Austin and spending several years working in comics and film/TV production, he launched his book review website SFReviews.net in July 2001. In late 2013, he joined YouTube’s growing Booktube community, launching his channel SFF180 — featuring reviews, interviews, and his popular weekly new-release roundup Mailbag Monday — and revamping his original website under the new name.
Howard Waldrop
Born in 1946 in Mississippi, Howard Waldrop came to Texas as a 4-year-old. He began selling in 1969 and hasn’t stopped yet. Fourteen of his short story collections have been published so far. His most recent book is Horse of a Different Color (Small Beer Press). Howard’s current projects include The Moone Worlde and The Search for Tom Purdue. An excerpt of the latter was published in Subterranean Press Magazine. Howard’s latest story, “Till the Cows Come Home to Roost”, was published last year in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Holly Lyn Walrath
Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Liminality, and elsewhere. She is the author of Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. She is a freelance editor and host of The Weird Circular, an e-newsletter for writers containing submission calls and writing prompts.
Don Webb
Don’s books have been published by Inner Traditions and St. Martins. He teaches horror writing for UCLA Extension. And a kazillion local classes. He has had work in F&SF, Amazing, Analog, Asimov’s, Dragon, Wired, Weird Tales, Interzone and 45+ anthologies. He gives long speeches about the interrelationship of introversion and creativity to his cats Sascha and Big Pig
Jacob Weisman
Jacob Weisman is the World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of The New Voices of Fantasy (with Peter S. Beagle). He is the publisher at Tachyon Publications, an acclaimed San Francisco-based speculative fiction press, which he founded in 1995. Weisman is the series editor of Tachyon’s critically acclaimed, award-winning novella line, including the Hugo Award-winner, The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson, and the Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-winner, We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory. He has also edited the anthologies Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell), and The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David M. Sandner). His latest anthology, The New Voices of Science Fiction (with Hannu Rajaniemi) will be published later this year.
Wendy Wheeler
A founder of Austin’s long-lived SlugTribe SF/F writers group, Wendy Wheeler has sold fiction to Analog, DailySF, Aboriginal SF, Gorezone, and other periodicals, as well as to anthologies Snow White Blood Red, Silver Birch Blood Moon, The Crafters, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. She’s at work on her first novel (still), was a writer for hitRECord.tv and also does genre screenplays and freelance story development. Visit www.slugtribe.org for info.
Skyler White
Skyler White lives in Austin, Texas where she writes fiction, ghostwrites non-fiction, copywrites, rights wrongs, dances at rites, and wrought two children. She’s worked as a Creative Writing teacher and a book (witch)doctor. She’s written two novels with Steven Brust (The Incrementalists and The Skill of Our Hands) and two on her own (and Falling, Fly and In Dreams Begin). Her next solo novel Young Blood comes out this December.
Troyce Wilson
Troyce Wilson has been involved in fandom since 1977. He was an Aggiecon officer in the ’80s and was active in the Society for Creative Anachronisms. He studied medieval history at Texas A&M University where he works as an IT Manager. He’s married to writer Martha Wells.
Michael Wolff
Engaging . . . witty . . . knowledgeable . . . intense . . . controversial. These and so many other words can be found in the dictionary. As for Michael Wolff, he’s an occasionally curmudgeonly and arthritic old man who once gamboled happily about the Texas A&M campus (we’ll just gloss over the details of that for the time being). Following the grand tradition of many other self-described creative types, he’s held no regular profession (having been employed in many different jobs throughout the years). His overall focus has been on writing. (And watching SF films, but it’s harder making a living doing that.)His professional writing career (yes! He says that with a straight face.) began in the early 1980s when he helped turn the Houston Comic Collectors Newsletter into Comic Informer magazine. The magazine didn’t enjoy as much success as its staff would’ve liked, but it was read by the Right People and, when Michael decided to try and write for Starlog, he found he already had something of an In and spent several years writing articles and book reviews (as well as having a handful of Superman scripts appear in Action Comics and having no less than three . . . count ’em, three . . . startup comic book companies shot out from under him). His main love, however, was fiction, and he wrote The Great American Bloated Gargantuan and Totally Unreadable neo-Epic (Pierce Elevated) back in the 1980s. As incredible as it seems, the publishers weren’t interested in it and, with many a grumble, Wolff shelved the work and turned elsewhere, eventually producing a much smaller (and much more readable) romantic comedy (Cosimo’s Raven), as well as an adventure thriller (Disappointed). The publishing world maddeningly continued to disregard his efforts, and Michael worked on other smaller projects to keep his hand in. When a comics project fell through at the turn of the century, Michael turned again to novel writing. A love for classic Young Adult science-fiction caused him to start a series of novels centered around Sandra Swift: the sister of Tom Swift Jr. These were well received by the fan community (who aren’t as easy to please as one might think) and, bolstered by the response (as well as a growing need for an additional source of income), Michael started making them available to the public, as well as Cosimo’s Raven, Disappointed and Pierce Elevated… the latter being reduced to a trim, compact 600+ pages. (Don’t worry. Pierce Elevated is the biggest thing Michael’s ever written, and he doubts he’ll go to such lengths ever again.)
D. L. Young
D.L. Young is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Independent Press Award. His Dark Republic novels are futuristic thrillers set in the aftermath of a failed Texas secession. Juarez Square and Other Stories, his short fiction collection, includes the best of his previously published work. He’s currently working on a new cyberpunk series.