Guests of Honor

Nancy Springer

Nancy Springer headshot photo

Nancy Springer is an American author of fantasy, young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction. Her novel Larque on the Wing won the the Otherwise Award (formerly The Tiptree Award) in 1994. A prolific author, she has written more than fifty books over a career that has spanned nearly four decades.

She released her first Enola Holmes book in 2006, following which she published six sequels in the series. Her other series include Book of Isle (fantasy) and the Tales of Rowan Hood. Her work, The Enola Holmes Mysteries, was adapted in 2020 as a Netflix film, Enola Holmes.

nancyspringer.com

Music Guest of Honor: Jen Midkiff

Jen Midkiff plays Celtic harp and tenor guitar, and sings songs about critters, favorite science-fiction and fantasy characters and worlds, brain fog, and the frustrations of gravity.

As part of the filk band Wild Mercy, she has won the Pegasus Award for Best Performer, and has three albums with Wild Mercy, and two full-length albums and an EP as a solo performer. She is a professional music educator,  and is working to become a Certified Music Practitioner (providing therapeutic music in hospital and hospice settings).

www.heart2harp.com

Ghost of Honor: Steve Stiles

Steve Stiles at drawingboard

Steve Stiles (1943-2020) became a science fiction fan in 1957. He illustrated fanzines from then until his death, earning him the first Rotsler Fan Artist Award in 1998, and a Fan Artist Hugo in 2016.

Professionally, he worked in numerous comic book genres since 1973 (horror, super hero, science fiction, humor), including the award-winning Xenozoic Tales and perhaps the first steampunk graphic novel, The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle, with author Richard Lupoff. His mere recent projects included work on an anthology of his underground strips, The Return of Hyper Comics, and a 200 page historical graphic novel. Steve was a regular at Balticon and is greatly missed.

stevestiles.com

Special Guest: Kevin Roche

Kevin Roche photo

Kevin Roche has been costuming since he was 8, and a conrunner for years. In his secret identity as a scientist at IBM Research Almaden, he’s hard at work wrangling giant robot vacuum chambers and electrons in atomically engineered materials, and is an IBM Q Ambassador and Qiskit Advocate, explaining the weird world of quantum computers to audiences around the world. He is also the editor of Yipe! The Costume Fanzine of Record (www.yipezine.com)

Special Guest: Andy Trembley

Andy Trembley photo

Andy Trembley found organized fandom in semi-rural Wisconsin when he learned of a SCA shire in his hometown. SCA led to costuming, filking and APAs. Costuming, filking and APAs led to conventions, and that led to attending events all over the upper-midwest. Most recently, Andy ran the “San Jose in 2018: Make the Future” campaign to bring Worldcon 76, the 2018 Worldcon, to San Jose. After a few years away from convention running, he and Kevin will be assisting Westercon 74’s hospitality team by planning their bar.

2022 Heinlein Award Winner: David Gerrold

David Gerrold headshot

David Gerrold’s prolific output includes stage shows, teleplays, film scripts, educational films, computer software, comic books, more than 50 novels and anthologies, and hundreds of articles, columns, and short stories. He has worked on a dozen different TV series. He is the author of Star Trek’s most popular episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Many of his novels are classics of the science fiction genre, including The Man Who Folded Himself, the ultimate time travel story, and When HARLIE Was One, considered one of the most thoughtful tales of artificial intelligence ever written.The Martian Child won the science fiction triple crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Poll. It was the basis for the 2007 film Martian Child.

A ten-time Hugo and Nebula award finalist, David is also a recipient of the Skylark Award for Excellence in Imaginative Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Horror, and the Forrest J. Ackerman lifetime achievement award.

His latest novel is Hella, an exploration of a world where everything is super-sized.

www.gerrold.com

Special Guest: Wen Spencer

Wen Spencer

Wen Spencer is the author of more than a dozen science fiction and fantasy novels including the Elfhome series. She’s the 2003 winner of the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2002 winner of the Compton Crook Award.

She lives on the Big Island of Hawaii in the shadow of five volcanoes, one of which made her life very interesting in recent years.

www.wenspencer.com

Special Guest: Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire photo

Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works, both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” For details on her work as Mira, check out miragrant.com.

In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music. She is also a cartoonist and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These…,” as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.

Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.

seananmcguire.com/

Special Guest: C. J. Cherryh

C J Cherryh

C. J. Cherryh is a speculative fiction writer, editor, and translator. She is best known for the Alliance-Union Universe, the Foreigner Universe, and the Fortress series. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977 and several Hugo Awards including Best Novel for Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988).

She has a Master of Arts in classics from Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Cherryh taught high school Latin, Ancient Greek, the classics, and ancient history. She enjoys figure skating and has an interest in genealogy, history, and archaeology. She lives in Spokane, Washington, USA. Her current project, with Jane S. Fancher, is working on a sequel to their 2019 novel Alliance Rising set in the Alliance–Union universe.  

cherryh.com/ 

Ms. Cherryh will be attending virtually.

2020 Compton Crook Award Winner: Arkady Martine

Arkady Martine publicity photo

Arkady Martine is speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning.

Under both her names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2020 Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in Santa Fe with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw.

arkadymartine.net

2021 Compton Crook Award Winner: Micaiah Johnson

Micaiah Johnson photo

Micaiah Johnson was raised in California’s Mojave Desert surrounded by trees named Joshua and women who told stories.

She received her bachelor of arts in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her master of fine arts in fiction from Rutgers University–Camden. She now studies American literature at Vanderbilt University, where she focuses on critical race theory and automatons.

Her debut novel, The Space Between Worlds, from Hodder in the UK and Crown in the US, is a science-fiction novel that uses the concept of the multiverse to examine privilege.

micaiahjohnson.com

2022 Compton Crook Award Winner: P. Djèlí Clark

Phenderson Djèlí Clark is the author of the novel A Master of Djinn, and the award-winning and Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon nominated author of the novellas Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories have appeared in online venues such as Tor.com, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies including, Griots and Hidden Youth. You can find him on Twitter at @pdjeliclark and his blog The Disgruntled Haradrim.

Born in New York and raised mostly in Houston, Texas, he spent the early formative years of his life in the homeland of his parents, Trinidad and Tobago. When not writing speculative fiction, P. Djèlí Clark works as an academic historian whose research spans comparative slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. He melds this interest in history and the social world with speculative fiction, and has written articles on issues ranging from racism and H.P. Lovecraft to critiques of George Schuyler’s Black Empire, and has been a panelist and lecturer at conventions, workshops and other genre events.

(Compton Crook Award details)